Abstract
Ecologists and land managers are becoming increasingly aware that the landscape context within whicha 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 centralEuropean country (Czech Republic) is affected by land use.
We used a multi-taxa approach based on sixtaxa, 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 tothe lowest area of surrounding land use types, followed by beetles, butterflies and plants, and finallybirds. Species richness in most of the taxa studied was enhanced by an increase in the area covered byorchards in the surrounding landscape.
Our findings support the idea that multi-taxa responses to landuse in landscape studies should be measured at different scales, for example, by making use of spatialpartitioning. Our study showed that although they are an artificial patches, traditional orchards helpmaintain biodiversity in rural agricultural landscapes, and that an increase in the area covered by similarpatches in the surroundings also increases the species richness of the studied taxa.