Field-work photos from the transect walk method and the flower resources assessment from the four years of the study (IMAGE)
Caption
Pollinators are declining rapidly, largely due to land conversion and intensification of agriculture. To mitigate their crisis, low-disturbance habitats, such as sown wildflower plantings, could promote pollinators by restoration of their resources. However, comprehensive knowledge is lacking on how landscape context, spatial configuration and age of wildflower plantings, seasonality and flower composition affect pollinator communities, especially from East-Central Europe. To understand these effects, reasearchers of HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research established diverse native wildflower plantings within heterogeneous and homogeneous agricultural landscapes.
To assess pollinator insect abundance and diversity, we performed surveys on the wildflower plantings during two contrasting peak flowering periods of seasons: early summer (turn of May-June) and mid-summer (turn of July-August). We sampled pollinators by the widely used transect walk method. The transects were 75 m long in the fields, and 25 m long in each strip. The net observation time was 15 minutes in fields, and 5 minutes in the strips per transect, making the same sampling effort at landscape plot level. We always carried out transect walks in favourable sunny weather conditions during the sampled pollinators’ active flying time of the day.
Simultaneously with the pollinators’ transect sampling, we assessed flower resources at the plant species level in 1×1 m quadrats along the transects. We counted flower units (flowers, inflorescences and flowers per inflorescence) of each potentially insect-pollinated plant species that was flowering during the actual sampling.
Credit
Photos: Borbála Bihaly (top left, buttom right) and Áron Bihaly (buttom left, middle and top right)
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