Taxon-specific temporal shifts in pollinating insects in mass-flowering crops and field margins in Ireland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In intensively cropped agricultural landscapes, the vegetation in edges and hedges (henceforth “field margins”) represents an important semi-natural habitat providing fundamental resources for insect pollinators. We surveyed the pollinating insects associated with two mass-flowering crops, apple and oilseed rape, and compared the insect fauna of the main crop with that in the field margins in the grass-dominated agricultural landscapes of Ireland. Different insect groups responded differently to the presence of the flowering crop, with honey and bumble bees more abundant in crops than margins during crop flowering, but more hover flies and butterflies in margins throughout. The composition of the insect assemblage also shifted over time due to taxon-specific changes in abundance. For example, solitary bees were most abundant early in the season, whereas hover flies peaked, and butterflies declined, in mid-summer. The temporal shift in insect community structure was associated with parallel changes in the field margin flora, and, although we found no relationship between insect abundance and abundance of field margin flowers, Bombus abundance and total insect abundance were positively correlated with floral diversity. After the crop flowering period, floral abundance and diversity was maintained via margin plants, but by late summer, floral resources declined. Our results confirm the importance of field margins for insect pollinators of entomophilous crops set within grass-dominated landscapes, even during the crop flowering period, and provide additional support for agri-environment schemes that protect and/or improve field margin biodiversity. The results also demonstrate that although shifts in insect and plant communities may be linked phenologically there may not always be simple relationships between insect and floral abundance and richness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".