Aim: Many insect species are facing existential crises, primarily due to diverse human activities. Most insect assessments, however, are based on relatively short time series or some iconic species. Here, we assess how the occupancy of ground beetles has changed in Germany over the last 36 years. Location: Germany. Methods: In close collaboration with taxonomic experts from natural history societies, we compiled the best available occurrence data for ground beetles in Germany, estimated the changes in species occupancy over time, and related these changes to species traits and characteristics. Results: We obtained trends for 383 species and found that 52% of species significantly declined, and 22% significantly increased in site occupancy over the last 36 years. The remainder of the species (26%) all showed a mean negative trend, albeit nonsignificant. Species classified as non-threatened in the German red list declined at a similar rate as threatened species, with 64% of the Near Threatened species experiencing significant declines (highest among all red list categories). Across all traits, we found that large (compared to medium-sized) and omnivore (compared to predator) species declined less. Conclusions: Since ground beetles are key predators in many natural and agricultural ecosystems that play an important role in pest control and the food chain, their decline should raise concerns. Thus, we urgently plead for more harmonised and systematic monitoring of this insect group.

Agricultural pesticides, nutrients, and habitat degradation are major causes of insect declines in lowland streams. To effectively conserve and restore stream habitats, standardized stream monitoring data and societal support for freshwater protection are needed. Here, we sampled 137 small stream monitoring sites across Germany, 83 % of which were located in agricultural catchments, with >900 citizen scientists in 96 monitoring groups. Sampling was carried out according to Water Framework Directive standards as part of the citizen science freshwater monitoring program FLOW in spring and summer 2021, 2022 and 2023. The biological indicator SPEARpesticides was used to assess pesticide exposure and effects based on macroinvertebrate community composition. Overall, 58 % of the agricultural monitoring sites failed to achieve a good ecological status in terms of macroinvertebrate community composition and indicated high pesticide exposure (SPEARpesticides status class: 29 % "moderate", 19 % "poor", 11 % "bad"). The indicated pesticide pressure in streams was related to the proportion of arable land in the catchment areas (R2 = 0.23, p < 0.001). Also with regards to hydromorphology, monitoring results revealed that 65 % of the agricultural monitoring sites failed to reach a good status. The database produced by citizen science groups was characterized by a high degree of accuracy, as results obtained by citizen scientists and professionals were highly correlated for SPEARpesticides index (R2 = 0.79, p < 0.001) and hydromorphology index values (R2 = 0.72, p < 0.001). Such citizen-driven monitoring of the status of watercourses could play a crucial role in monitoring and implementing the objectives of the European Water Framework Directive, thus contributing to restoring and protecting freshwater ecosystems.

Protected Areas contribute to the conservation of nature with associated cultural ecosystem services (CES) and values, such as recreational and educational opportunities, wildlife observation, scenic beauty, inspiration and sense of belonging. Informed management of Protected Areas needs to consider the distinct use and preferences for CES of different types of visitors to increase opportunities for nature experience while avoiding conflicts with biodiversity conservation. Therefore, it is important to understand the linkages between visitor characteristics and their demand for specific sets of CES, particularly in fragile mountain ecosystems. Here we do so by combining information from individual on-site surveys and participatory mapping of visitors in four European mountain Protected Areas. We analysed visitors' frequency of use of eight CES and their socio-demographic information, identifying three clusters of visitors. We also assessed the spatial distribution of CES locations used by each visitor cluster. Our results highlight strong differences between clusters both in the most frequently experienced CES and in the spatial location where those CES were experienced. We suggest that a better understanding of visitors regarding the way they experience nature is relevant for the environmental management of mountain Protected Areas and their surroundings.

Agricultural pesticides, nutrients, and habitat degradation are major causes of insect declines in lowland streams. To effectively conserve and restore stream habitats, standardized stream monitoring data and societal support for freshwater protection are needed. Here, we sampled 137 small stream sites across Germany, 83% of which were located in agricultural catchments, with more than 900 citizen scientists in 96 monitoring groups. Sampling was carried out according to Water Framework Directive standards as part of the citizen science freshwater monitoring program FLOW in spring and summer 2021, 2022 and 2023. The biological indicator SPEAR pesticides was used to assess pesticide exposure and effects based on benthic invertebrate community composition. Overall, 58% of the monitored agricultural stream sites did not achieve a good ecological status in terms of macroinvertebrate community composition and indicated high pesticide exposure (SPEAR pesticides status class: 29% ‘moderate’, 19% ‘poor’, 11% ‘bad’). The indicated pesticide pressure in streams was related to the proportion of agricultural land in the catchment area (R 2 =0.23, p<0.001). With regards to hydromorphology, monitoring results revealed that 65% of the agricultural stream sites failed to reach a good status. The data base produced by citizen science groups was characterized by a high degree of accuracy. This was quantified by a comparative survey of SPEAR pesticides index (R 2 =0.79, p<0.001) and hydromorphology index values (R 2 =0.72, p<0.001) by citizen scientists and professionals. Such citizen-driven monitoring of the status of watercourses could play a crucial role in monitoring and implementing the objective of the European Water Framework Directive, thus contributing to restoring and protecting freshwater ecosystems. Graphical abstract Highlights - Assessment of ecological status of small agricultural streams in Germany - Pesticides affected invertebrates (bioindicator SPEAR) in 58% of agricultural streams - Failure to reach good hydromorphological status in 65% of agricultural streams - Citizen science monitoring achieves high data accuracy - Citizen science can support European Water Framework Directive monitoring

The potential supply of ecosystem services is often assessed using land cover data. Assessment of actual use of ecosystem services by beneficiaries remains less covered and is often assumed to be congruent with potential supply. However, we believe that to contribute to the sustainable management of multifunctional landscapes, more insights are needed on the links between landscape characteristics and the various facets of ecosystem services. In this paper, we assess cultural ecosystem services (CES) such as recreation, inspiration or scenic beauty in three European mountain protected areas and their surroundings. We study the alignment between the potential supply and actual use of CES. CES potential supply was modelled using six biophysical indicators derived from earth observation and open geospatial data. For CES actual use, we employed participatory mapping with protected area visitors and local experts. We modelled CES actual use as a function of landscape biophysical indicators, weighted by (i) stated and (ii) revealed visitor preferences, and accessibility in each protected area using generalized additive mixed-effects models. Accessibility alone could explain around 50% of the variability of CES actual use, and with the additional inclusion of the 'natural and cultural features' variable, the actual use models reached an explanatory power of around 80% for all three case-studies. Importantly, biophysical information using land cover data alone cannot fully describe CES actual use, and there was little congruency between modelled potential supply and actual use. Additional socio-cultural features are required to explain the patterns of locations where protected area visitors enjoy CES. Our results can inform visitor management by addressing CES actual use and thereby provide evidence for landscape management and conservation planning and management, including offering a rewarding experience of nature for visitors.

Long-term analyses of biodiversity data highlight a 'biodiversity conservation paradox': biological communities show substantial species turnover over the past century(1,2), but changes in species richness are marginal(1,3-5). Most studies, however, have focused only on the incidence of species, and have not considered changes in local abundance. Here we asked whether analysing changes in the cover of plant species could reveal previously unrecognized patterns of biodiversity change and provide insights into the underlying mechanisms. We compiled and analysed a dataset of 7,738 permanent and semi-permanent vegetation plots from Germany that were surveyed between 2 and 54 times from 1927 to 2020, in total comprising1,794 species of vascular plants. We found that decrements in cover, averaged across all species and plots, occurred more often than increments; that the number of species that decreased in cover was higher than the number of species that increased; and that decrements were more equally distributed among losers than were gains among winners. Null model simulations confirmed that these trends do not emerge by chance, but are the consequence of species-specific negative effects of environmental changes. In the long run, these trends might result in substantial losses of species at both local and regional scales. Summarizing the changes by decade shows that the inequality in the mean change in species cover of losers and winners diverged as early as the 1960s. We conclude that changes in species cover in communities represent an important but understudied dimension of biodiversity change that should more routinely be considered in time-series analyses.

Aim In this study, we assessed the importance of local- to landscape-scale effects of land cover and land use on flying insect biomass. Location Denmark and parts of Germany. Methods We used rooftop-mounted car nets in a citizen science project ("InsectMobile") to allow for large-scale geographic sampling of flying insects. Volunteers sampled insects along 278 five-km routes in urban, farmland, grassland, wetland and forest landscapes in the summer of 2018. The bulk insect samples were dried overnight to obtain the sample biomass. We extracted proportional land use variables in buffers between 50 and 1,000 m along the routes and compiled them into land cover categories to examine the effect of each land cover, and specific land use types, on insect biomass. Results We found a negative association between urban cover and flying insect biomass (1% increase in urban cover = 1% [95% CI: -3.0 to 0.0] decrease in biomass in Denmark, and a 3% [95% CI: -3.0 to 0.0] decrease in Germany) at a landscape scale (1,000-m buffer). In Denmark, we also found positive effects of semi-natural land cover types, that is protected grassland (largest at the landscape scale, 1000 m) and forests (largest at intermediate scales, 250 m). Protected grassland cover had a stronger positive effect on insect biomass than forest cover did. For farmland cover, the positive association with insect biomass was not clearly modified by any variable associated with farmland use intensity. The negative association between insect biomass and urban land cover appeared to be reduced by increased urban green space. Main conclusions Our results show that land cover has an impact on flying insect biomass with the magnitude of this effect varying across spatial scales. However, the vast expanse of grey space in urbanized areas has a direct negative impact on flying insect biomass across all spatial scales examined.

Christensen et al. criticized the application of Beals’ index of sociological favourability to adjust for incomplete species lists when comparing repeated surveys. Their main argument was that using Beals’ conditional occurrence probabilities would systematically underestimate biodiversity change compared to using observed frequencies. Although this might be the case for rare species, as we explicitly stated in our original publication, we here use a worked‐out example to show that this criticism is unjustified for species that are sufficiently represented in the reference data set. In our opinion, the misconception derives from ignoring one of the key requirements for applying Beal's index, which is the use of a sufficiently large reference data set to derive a reliable co‐occurrence matrix. We here show how the predicted probability for the occurrence of a species depends on the size of the reference data set and give recommendations on the premises for applying Beals’ approach for monitoring purposes.

Based on plant occurrence data covering all parts of Germany, we investigated changes in the distribution of 2136 plant species between 1960 and 2017. We analyzed 29 million occurrence records over an area of ~350,000 km 2 on a 5 × 5 km grid using temporal and spatiotemporal models and accounting for sampling bias. Since the 1960s, more than 70% of investigated plant species showed declines in nationwide occurrence. Archaeophytes (species introduced before 1492) most strongly declined but also native plant species experienced severe declines. In contrast, neophytes (species introduced after 1492) increased in their nationwide occurrence but not homogeneously throughout the country. Our analysis suggests that the strongest declines in native species already happened in the 1960s–1980s, a time frame in which often few data exist. Increases in neophytic species were strongest in the 1990s and 2010s. Overall, the increase in neophytes did not compensate for the loss of other species, resulting in a decrease in mean grid cell species richness of −1.9% per decade. The decline in plant biodiversity is a widespread phenomenon occurring in different habitats and geographic regions. It is likely that this decline has major repercussions on ecosystem functioning and overall biodiversity, potentially with cascading effects across trophic levels. The approach used in this study is transferable to other large‐scale trend analyses using heterogeneous occurrence data.

Rice ecosystems vary greatly in climate, edaphic conditions, landscape heterogeneity, agricultural management and biodiversity. However, ongoing land use intensification and conversion to large-scale monoculture are threatening this diversity. We analyzed how rice-growing regions in Southeast Asia differ in diversity and composition of vascular plants in paddy rice ecosystems, and how the local and regional biodiversity of these plants is determined by variations in abiotic conditions, habitat type (paddy vs. bunds) and the proximity of non-paddy habitats. The vegetation of paddies and their bunds was surveyed in seven important rice production regions located in highlands and lowlands of Vietnam and the Philippines. Within the regions we sampled 67 pairs of study sites comprising a total of 122 paddies and 134 bunds. We identified major drivers of field-level weed diversity (alpha diversity) separately for bunds and paddies. Species turnovers (beta diversity) across sampling sites, between paddies and their bunds, and between regions were visualized using the Bray-Curtis coefficient of dissimilarity and DCA ordinations. Species richness on bunds was mainly influenced by the proximity of non-paddy habitats, mean annual temperature and soil acidity. Soil moisture was the decisive factor for the variation in paddy weed richness. In both habitat types, Shannon diversity and the number of insect-pollinated plants showed patterns similar to species richness. Regional differences in plot species richness were stronger on bunds than in paddies. Species turnover was high among habitat types and between upland and lowland regions. Future ecological engineering approaches can build on our findings to promote pollination services more efficiently in Southeast Asian rice landscapes.

Aim The loss of biodiversity has raised serious concerns about the entailing losses of ecosystem services. Here, we explore the potential of repeated habitat mapping data to identify floristic changes over time. Using one German federal state as a case study, we assessed floristic changes between the 1980s and 2010s. These habitat data have great potential for analysis because of their high spatial coverage while also posing methodological challenges such as incomplete observation data. We developed a modelling approach that accounts for incomplete observations and explored the ability to detect temporal trends. Location The Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein (Germany) Methods We compiled plant species lists from the earliest (1980s) and most recent (2010s) habitat mapping survey and aligned differing habitat definitions across mapping campaigns. A total of 5,503 mapped polygons, each with a list of species records, intersected the two surveys. We accounted for underrecorded species by assigning occurrence probabilities, based on species co-occurrence information across all surveys, using Beals' index and tested the robustness of this approach by simulation experiments. For those species with significant increases and decreases in occurrence probability, we linked these trends to the species' functional characteristics. Results We found a systematic loss of species that are moderately threatened. Species that indicate low nitrogen supply and high soil moisture declined, suggesting a shift towards a more eutrophic and drier landscape. Importantly, assessing specific plant traits associated with losses, we also detected a decrease in species with reddish and blueish flowers and species providing nectar, pointing to a decrease of insect-pollinated taxa. Main conclusions The identified changes raise concerns that plant biodiversity has fundamentally changed over the last three decades, with concomitant consequences for ecosystem services, especially pollination. Given the general lack of historical standardized data, our approach for trend analyses using incomplete observation data may be widely applicable to assess long-term biodiversity change.

Recent studies report declines in biomass, abundance and diversity of terrestrial insect groups. While anthropogenic land use is one likely contributor to this decline, studies assessing land cover as a driver of insect dynamics are rare and mostly restricted in spatial scale and types of land cover. In this study, we used rooftop-mounted car nets in a citizen science project (‘InsectMobile’) to allow for large-scale geographic sampling of flying insects across Denmark and parts of Germany. Citizen scientists sampled insects along 278 10 km routes in urban, farmland and semi-natural (grassland, wetland and forest) landscapes in the summer of 2018. We assessed the importance of local to landscape-scale effects and land use intensity by relating insect biomass to land cover in buffers of 50, 250, 500 and 1000 m along the routes. We found a negative association of urban cover and a positive association of farmland on insect biomass at a landscape-scale (1000 m buffer) in both countries. In Denmark, we also found positive effects of all semi-natural land covers, i.e. grassland (largest at the landscape-scale, 1000 m), forests (largest at intermediate scales, 250 m), and wetlands (largest at the local-scale, 50 m). The negative association of insect biomass with urban land cover and positive association with farmland were not clearly modified by any variable associated with land use intensity. Our results show that land cover has an impact on flying insect biomass with the magnitude of this effect varying across spatial scales. Since we consistently found negative effects of urban land cover, our findings highlight the need for the conservation of semi-natural areas, such as wetlands, grasslands and forests, in Europe.

There is an increasing recognition that ecosystem services are inclusive and form bundles of services that deliver multiple contributions to people. Traditionally, the notion of bundles of services is grounded on biophysical assessments and less attention has been paid to the perspective of human experience and valuation of these bundles. Information about the benefits and values of bundles of services is relevant as it provides a common language to decision-makers and general society. In this perspective, we describe gastronomy as bundles of provisioning (e.g. food, energy, water) and cultural (e.g. recreation, aesthetics, inspiration, spiritual fulfilment) services. We discuss how gastronomy, as the co-production of bundles of services, can be enclosed by both the ecosystem and the human system. Examples are provided to illustrate the place-based values and particularities of the individual, communal and society values of gastronomy. We briefly present how gastronomy constitutes an opportunity for an integrated valuation of bundles of services, based on the plurality of gastronomic preferences and attitudes at the individual, social group and society levels. Finally, we highlight that deliberative processes may enable the social learning of shared values, which are useful for the valuation of ecosystem services and for making decisions on natural capital.

In a cross-disciplinary project (LEGATO) combining inter- and transdisciplinary methods, we quantify the dependency of rice-dominated socio-ecological systems on ecosystem functions (ESF) and the ecosystem services (ESS) the integrated system provides. In the collaboration of a large team including geo- and bioscientists, economists, political and cultural scientists, the mutual influences of the biological, climate and soil conditions of the agricultural area and its surrounding natural landscape have been analysed. One focus was on sociocultural and economic backgrounds, another on local as well as regional land use intensity and biodiversity, and the potential impacts of future climate and land use change. LEGATO analysed characteristic elements of three service strands defined by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA): (a) provisioning services: nutrient cycling and crop production; (b) regulating services: biocontrol and pollination; and (c) cultural services: cultural identity and aesthetics. However, in line with much of the current ESS literature, what the MA called supporting services is treated as ESF within LEGATO. As a core output, LEGATO developed generally applicable principles of ecological engineering (EE), suitable for application in the context of future climate and land use change. EE is an emerging discipline, concerned with the design, monitoring and construction of ecosystems and aims at developing strategies to optimise ecosystem services through exploiting natural regulation mechanisms instead of suppressing them. Along these lines LEGATO also aims to create the knowledge base for decision-making for sustainable land management and livelihoods, including the provision of the corresponding governance and management strategies, technologies and system solutions.

Continuing global population growth requires an increase in food production, but also new strategies to reduce negative effects of intensive land use on the environment. Rice as key staple food for a majority of the human population is of crucial importance for global and particularly Southeast Asian food supply. As food provision is one key ecosystem service (ES), it is important to know which ESs are provided at which places. Therefore, an ES scoring exercise harnessing local experts’ knowledge in a ‘rapid assessment’ was conducted in seven rice cropping regions in Vietnam and the Philippines. The expert-based scoring values were linked in an ‘ES-matrix’ to the different land use/land cover (LULC) classes abundant in the study areas. The LULC classifications were based on SPOT satellite image interpretation. The matrices were used to compile ES supply maps that give first indications about ES in regions with different intensive agriculture. The outcomes provide a first ‘screening’ of ES supply related to different LULC types in rice-dominated regions enabling the communication of the relevance of specific ecosystems for local communities and decision makers. Uncertainties inherent in expert- and land cover-based ES assessments are discussed and recommendations for improvements of future studies are given.

gricultural landscapes and ecosystem services in South-East sia—the LEGATO-Project osef Settelea,b,∗, Joachim H. Spangenberga,c, Kong Luen Heongd,q, enjamin Burkharde,f, Jesus Victor Bustamanteg, Jimmy Cabbigatg, o Van Chienh, Monina Escaladai, Volker Greschoa,j, Le Huu Haik, lexander Harpkea, Finbarr G. Horgand, Stefan Hotesl, Reinhold Jahnm, ngolf Kuhna,b, Leonardo Marquezn, Martin Schadlera,b, Vera Tekkeno, oris Vetterleina, Sylvia “Bong” Villareald, Catrin Westphalp, Martin Wiemersa