Farming practices affecting diversity

THE country’s natural abundance and diversity of bees, birds and other insects and plants has been seriously affected by intensive farming practices, a scientific study has found.

The increased use of machinery, the removal of hedgerows, and the greater use of chemicals has led to landscape simplification and degradation and a reduction in the diversity of species across the Irish countryside, the Ag-Biota research discovered.

Dr Gordon Purvis from the UCD School of Biology and Environmental Science, who led the five-year project, said: “While bumblebees as a group are still readily found on typical farmland, our findings reveal that their abundance and diversity on moderately-to-intensively managed farmland may have declined by at least 50% over the past 20-30 years.”