Summary:

Agricultural intensification during the last centuries has radically changed the distribution and management of wetlands in the landscape, through drainage, cessation of grazing and haymaking and the more recent construction of wetlands to catch nutrient run-off from agriculture. The dramatic change in wetland distribution has affected many species that depend on wetlands as a habitat. The challenge that we meet in this project is the possibility that constructed wetlands may re-establish the role of wetlands in the agricultural landscape as reservoirs for arthropod biodiversity, but that the value of these wetlands for biodiversity depends on their management. The project will meet the challenge by examining how wetland management affect plant species composition and arthropod biodiversity. We will include managed natural wetlands as a comparison, to include a wider range of management strategies. Through observational and experimental studies, we will study the effect of management regimes such as grazing, mechanic vegetation removal and water table control on terrestrial arthropod diversity and function in the agricultural landscape. In each wetland, we will quantify richness and abundance of beetles, spiders and dipterans, and study the importance of wetland resources for biodiversity related ecosystem services in the surrounding agricultural landscape by constructing trophic networks across the terrestrial-wetland border using molecular tools.