header_bild

FInAl - Phase 2

Promotion of insects in agricultural landscapes through integrated cultivation systems with renewable raw materials - Subproject Aquatic Insects


Term

2022-10-01 bis 2025-09-30

Project management

  • Stefan, Lorenz


Responsible institute

Institut für ökologische Chemie, Pflanzenanalytik und Vorratsschutz


Cooperation partner

  • Institut für Strategien und Folgenabschätzung (JKI)
  • Johann Heinrich von Thünen-Institut, Bundesforschungsinstitut für Ländliche Räume, Wald und Fischerei
  • Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF) e.V.


Overall objective of the project

FInAL pursues the goal of developing, testing, demonstrating and modeling innovative and complex insect-friendly measures in the landscape context within the framework of landscape laboratories in three typical agricultural landscapes in Germany. Landscape laboratories are selected landscape sections that serve as experimental spaces with real-world conditions and in which a long-term and resilient transformation towards insect-friendly agriculture is aimed for. FInAL uses transdisciplinary methods to develop regionally adapted and co-designed solutions that take into account the needs of both the stakeholders and the insects, and to enable joint learning by all stakeholders involved in the transformation process (co-learning). The knowledge and experience gained within the landscape labs will be used to derive general recommendations on how transformations can be effectively initiated and implemented in other agricultural areas as well. Agricultural systems will be established in the landscape laboratories, which will be observed over the expected transformation phase(s) and compared with unaffected agricultural systems. In doing so, the sustainability fields of environment/biodiversity, economy, and social relevance and cooperation will be mapped equally through data and indicators to enable a comprehensive comparison between status quo and innovation in terms of sustainability. A landscape approach is adopted, i.e. the total area of the landscape laboratory is the object of analysis and therefore of targeted change. Therefore, the landscape laboratory approach includes all agricultural land as well as the non-agricultural landscape components (especially marginal structures) and includes all actors active in the area. The aim of the subproject "aquatic insects" is to record and describe the biodiversity (measured are: species diversity and abundance) of aquatic insects in small streams and standing waters in order to estimate the effects of the measures on the aquatic insect communities. The measures are implemented in the landscape laboratory. An additional landscape section will be sampled as a reference and to control for variation in target variables due to environmental conditions. On this basis, trends in change are described. Food webs will also be presented for some water bodies and indicator species lists will be derived. Recommendations to the practitioners and on measure design to promote aquatic insects will be derived from these results.


Funder

Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture