Citizen science monitoring reveals links between honeybee health, pesticide exposure and seasonal availability of floral resources.

We use a national citizen science monitoring scheme to quantify how agricultural intensification affects honeybee diet breadth (number of plant species). To do this we used DNA metabarcoding to identify the plants present in 527 honey samples collected in 2019 across Great Britain. The species richness of forage plants was negatively correlated with arable cropping area, although this was only found early in the year when the abundance of flowering plants was more limited. Within intensively farmed areas, honeybee diets were dominated by Brassica crops (including oilseed rape). We demonstrate how the structure and complexity of honeybee foraging relationships with plants is negatively affected by the area of arable crops surrounding hives. Using information collected from the beekeepers on the incidence of an economically damaging bee disease (Deformed Wing Virus) we found that the occurrence of this disease increased where bees foraged in agricultural land where there was a high use of foliar insecticides. Understanding impacts of land use on resource availability is fundamental to assessing long-term viability of pollinator populations. These findings highlight the importance of supporting temporally timed resources as mitigation strategies to support wider pollinator population viability.

Soil multifunctionality and drought resistance are determined by plant structural traits in restoring grassland.

It is increasingly recognized that belowground responses to vegetation change are closely linked to plant functional traits. However, our understanding is limited concerning the relative importance of different plant traits for soil functions and of the mechanisms by which traits influence soil properties in the real world. Here we test the hypothesis that taller species, or those with complex rooting structures, are associated with high rates of nutrient and carbon (C) cycling in grassland. We further hypothesized that communities dominated by species with deeper roots may be more resilient to drought. These hypotheses were tested in a 3-yr grassland restoration experiment on degraded ex-arable land in southern England. We sowed three trait-based plant functional groups, assembled using database derived values of plant traits, and their combinations into bare soil. This formed a range of plant trait syndromes onto which we superimposed a simulated drought 2 yr after initial establishment. We found strong evidence that community weighted mean (CWM) of plant height is negatively associated with soil nitrogen cycling and availability and soil multifunctionality. We propose that this was due to an exploitative resource capture strategy that was inappropriate in shallow chalk soils. Further, complexity of root architecture was positively related to soil multifunctionality throughout the season, with fine fibrous roots being associated with greater rates of nutrient cycling. Drought resistance of soil functions including ecosystem respiration, mineralization, and nitrification were positively related to functional divergence of rooting depth, indicating that, in shallow chalk soils, a range of water capture strategies is necessary to maintain functions. Finally, after 3 yr of the experiment, we did not detect any links between the plant traits and microbial communities, supporting the finding that traits based on plant structure and resource foraging capacity are the main variables driving soil function in the early years of grassland conversion. We suggest that screening recently restored grassland communities for potential soil multifunctionality and drought resilience may be possible based on rooting architecture and plant height. These results indicate that informed assembly of plant communities based on plant traits could aid in the restoration of functioning in degraded soil.

The diversity and evolution of ecological and environmental citizen science.

Citizen science-the involvement of volunteers in data collection, analysis and interpretation-simultaneously supports research and public engagement with science, and its profile is rapidly rising. Citizen science represents a diverse range of approaches, but until now this diversity has not been quantitatively explored. We conducted a systematic internet search and discovered 509 environmental and ecological citizen science projects. We scored each project for 32 attributes based on publicly obtainable information and used multiple factor analysis to summarise this variation to assess citizen science approaches. We found that projects varied according to their methodological approach from 'mass participation' (e.g. easy participation by anyone anywhere) to 'systematic monitoring' (e.g. trained volunteers repeatedly sampling at specific locations). They also varied in complexity from approaches that are 'simple' to those that are 'elaborate' (e.g. provide lots of support to gather rich, detailed datasets). There was a separate cluster of entirely computer-based projects but, in general, we found that the range of citizen science projects in ecology and the environment showed continuous variation and cannot be neatly categorised into distinct types of activity. While the diversity of projects begun in each time period (pre 1990, 1990-99, 2000-09 and 2010-13) has not increased, we found that projects tended to have become increasingly different from each other as time progressed (possibly due to changing opportunities, including technological innovation). Most projects were still active so consequently we found that the overall diversity of active projects (available for participation) increased as time progressed. Overall, understanding the landscape of citizen science in ecology and the environment (and its change over time) is valuable because it informs the comparative evaluation of the 'success' of different citizen science approaches. Comparative evaluation provides an evidence-base to inform the future development of citizen science activities.

Local production of WHO-recommended alcohol-based handrubs: feasibility, advantages, barriers and costs.

PROBLEM: Reduction of health-care-associated infections in low- and middle-income countries is hampered by inadequate supplies of soap and water and the lack or high cost of alcohol-based handrubs (ABHs). APPROACH: In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed and tested two formulations for ABHs that were suitable for production in health-care facilities. In 2011, the feasibility, advantages and costs of the local production of the two formulations - and the barriers to such production - were evaluated in an online survey. LOCAL SETTING: The survey included 34 health-care facilities and 5 private companies in 29 countries. RELEVANT CHANGES: Local production of one of the WHO formulations was feasible in every participating site. Twenty-one (54%) of the sites had replaced a previously used ABH with one of the WHO formulations. In 32 sites, the WHO formulation that had been produced was well tolerated and accepted by health-care workers. The WHO formulations were found to be less expensive than marketed ABHs. Barriers to local production included difficulty in identifying staff with adequate skills, the need for staff training, and constraints in ingredient and dispenser procurement. LESSONS LEARNT: The WHO formulations can be easily produced locally at low cost. They are well tolerated and accepted by health-care workers. Potential barriers to their local production - such as their smell and problems in the procurement of ingredients and dispensers and in performing quality control - require further investigation.

Lethal combat and sex ratio evolution in a parasitoid wasp.

Sex allocation theory provides excellent opportunities for testing how behavior and life histories are adjusted in response to environmental variation. One of the most successful areas from this respect is Hamilton's local mate competition theory. As predicted by theory, a large number of animal species have been shown to adjust their offspring sex ratios (proportion male) conditionally, laying less female-biased sex ratios as the number of females that lay eggs on a patch increases. However, recent studies have shown that this predicted pattern is not followed by 2 parasitoid species in the genus Melittobia, which always produce extremely female-biased sex ratios. A possible explanation for this is that males fight fatally and that males produced by the first female to lay eggs on a patch have a competitive advantage over later emerging males. This scenario would negate the advantage of later females producing a less female-biased sex ratio. Here we examine fatal fighting and sex ratio evolution in another species, Melittobia acasta. We show that females of this species also fail to adjust their offspring sex ratio in response to the number of females laying eggs on a patch. We then show that although earlier emerging males do have an advantage in winning fights, this advantage 1) can be reduced by an interaction with body size, with larger males more likely to win fights and 2) only holds for a brief period around the time at which the younger males emerge from their pupae. This suggests that lethal male combat cannot fully explain the lack of sex ratio shift observed in Melittobia species. We discuss alternative explanations.