Dr Ben Alex Woodcock - UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

The importance of invertebrate biodiversity in agriculture 

Dr Ben Woodcock – UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

At its heart arable agriculture needs to support food production and maintain profitable farming systems vital to peoples livelihoods. Increased mechanisation, conversion of semi-natural habitats to production land and the wide spread use of agrochemicals have been critical to achieving these goals, but they have come at a cost to biodiversity that a century ago would have been a common feature of agricultural land. While there has been a wide scale acknowledgement that biodiversity declines are attributable to the impacts of farming at the same time there has also been an increased understanding that some of this biodiversity support production. This includes invertebrates that enhance pollination and natural pest control. In this talk I will discuss research looking at how agriculture can be modified to support greater levels of biodiversity, maximising those components of invertebrate fauna that provide critical ecosystem services while maintaining production leading to into sustainable agriculture. This talk will also consider the impacts of pesticides -  arguably one of the biggest impacts to farmland biodiversity, outside direct habitat loss -  on biodiversity and how new post-regulation monitoring may support the improved use of  what is currently a necessary evil.  

Personal Bio: My work focuses on reducing the impacts of modern agriculture on the wider environment, seeking to understand how we can maintain agricultural productivity while reducing the consequences that this has for wider biodiversity.  This work has focused on how farmers can benefit from ecosystem services such as crop pollination (e.g. provided by bees) and natural pest control (e.g. provided by predatory insects like beetles).  Integrating these species in a sustainable way into farming systems is critical to the long-term viability of UK agriculture, but achieving this is complex depending in part on the creation of semi-natural habitats though agri-environmental schemes (including flower rich field margins and grassland recreation) and the more effective use of pesticides.    In a wider sense I am interested in the drivers of invertebrate biodiversity loss in agricultural systems as well as more widely in the UK and elsewhere.  I work at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, where I have been since 2008. 

Host: Elli Leadbeater