Utilizzo di crop flowers per aumentare la biodiversità nel paesaggio agrario

Using Crop Flowers to Increase the Biodiversity in Agricultural Lamdscape.The use of field border strips with crop flowers (plants with a lot of nectar) influences some important factors of the agricultural ecosystem. These include the biodiversity, erosion, fertility and water balance of the soil. All the basic elements for sustainable agriculture. In the Mediterranean area, thousands of years of cohabitation between man and the environment have resulted in severe changes in the nature of the area and in the rural environment. The technological innovations available in recent times have made agricultural operations even more accentuated, above all in terms of protection for the environment. Many researchers in the sector believe that the main cause of the extinction of many species is the continual loss of their natural habitat (Shaffer, 1997). During the last century, the population of the world increased fourfold and given that the area of cultivated land doubled (Creutzen, 2006) as a consequence of this, it is therefore easy to imagine just how much the agricultural sector has affected the loss of biodiversity.Most plants are enomophilous. The community of phytophagous insects is made up of species which live in close contact with a host plant, a similar relationship exists between pollinators and plants. Some Hymenoptera, such as the bumblebee (Bombus spp.) cannot fly for very long distances, so the absence of flowering plants in vast areas means that these species will die out. The objective of our work was to assess the importance of field border strips with crop flowers for landscape. The experimentation was performed for the European project called Operation Pollinator which aims at demonstrating that productive agriculture and a rich and live environment in terms of biodiversity can exist contemporaneously