Biodiversity responses to land use in traditional fruit orchards of a rural agricultural landscape

Ecologists and land managers are becoming increasingly aware that the landscape context within which a habitat fragment exists could be as important as the habitat fragment itself. Our aims were to find how, and at which spatial scale of the landscape, the biodiversity of a rural agricultural landscape of a central European country (Czech Republic) is affected by land use. We used a multi-taxa approach based on six taxa, namely (i) birds, (ii) bees and wasps, (iii) beetles, (iv) butterflies, (v) land snails, and (vi) plants, in 25 traditional fruit orchards. We carried out spatial partitioning of three different types of land use (orchards, deciduous woodlands and grasslands) with radii ranging from 200 m to 3200 m. With respect to land use, the spatial partitioning showed that land snails, and bees and wasps were influenced to the lowest area of surrounding land use types, followed by beetles, butterflies and plants, and finally birds. Species richness in most of the taxa studied was enhanced by an increase in the area covered by orchards in the surrounding landscape. Our findings support the idea that multi-taxa responses to land use in landscape studies should be measured at different scales, for example, by making use of spatial partitioning. Our study showed that although they are an artificial patches, traditional orchards help maintain biodiversity in rural agricultural landscapes, and that an increase in the area covered by similar patches in the surroundings also increases the species richness of the studied taxa.