Biology

About one-third of the world’s land surface is used for farming, a fact that bears important implications for biodiversity. In Europe, for instance, an estimated 50 percent of all wild species are reliant on agricultural habitats, while agricultural productivity often depends on the presence or absence of particular species. Despite this close coupling, surprisingly little is known about the status and evolution of farmland biodiversity. A team of European and African researchers, hoping to fill this gap in information, recently invented and piloted a new toolbox called the BioBio indicator set, which measures 23 different instances of biodiversity across a variety of farm types and scales in Europe. Applications were also tested in Tunisia, Ukraine, and Uganda, where they proved a feasible starting point for adaptation to the agricultural context of different countries.

Fourty percent of the EU land area is currently considered to be agriculturally managed, and there is growing attention to the environmental performance of farming practices. This involves the need for farm-scale monitoring programmes for sustainability, but their implementation is ampere by a number of difficulties such as the identification of indicators for different latitudes and environments and the evaluation of the effectiveness and costs of different monitoring approaches. In this paper, we focus on the costs of farm-scale biodiversity monitoring, presenting results from a Europe-wide cost data collection in the EU FP7 BioBio Project. Firstly, we propose an analytical assessment of resources consumed by the research units and a cost estimation for the measurement of six biodiversity-related parameters: habitat mapping, vegetation, wild bees and bumblebees, spiders, earthworms and a farm management questionnaire. Thereafter, we estimate a standardised cost for an ordinary mea...

At least 32 Amerindian groups in the Amazon basin use terrestrial invertebrates as food. Leaf-and litter-consuming invertebrates provide the more important, underestimated food sources for many Amerindian groups. Further, litter-consuming earthworms are also an important food resource for the Ye'Kuana (also known as Makiritare) in the Alto Orinoco (Amazonas, Venezuela). By selecting these small invertebrates the Amerindians are choosing their animal food from those food webs in the rainforest which have the highest energy £ow and which constitute the greatest renewable stock of readily available nutrients. Here we show that the consumption of leaf-and litter-feeding invertebrates as a means of recovering protein, fat and vitamins by the forest-living peoples o¡ers a new perspective for the development of sustainable animal food production within the paradigm of biodiversity maintenance.