Abstract
Fallowing represents a management practice that spares the land for at least one crop season. Reduction in the fallow period of rice-growing areas is, however, increasingly used to enhance grain production, and little is known about the possible effects of different extents of the fallow period on the aquatic fauna of irrigated fields. We assessed whether aquatic insect community structure differed among rice fields with different extents of fallow period and wetlands. Insects were collected in three rice fields with fallow season, three rice fields without a fallow season and three wetlands over the crop cycle in southern Brazil. Aquatic insect community structure markedly varied over the cultivation phases in wetlands and rice fields with and without fallow. While richness and abundance were lower in fallowing fields in the early phases of the cultivation cycle, richness was lower in rice fields without fallow at the end of the irrigated phase. Additionally, the composition of aquatic insects differed between wetlands and rice fields and between rice fields with different fallow periods, and showed reduced variation in rice fields without fallow. Our results indicate that changing fallowing extent can differently affect aquatic insect community structure in irrigated rice fields with respect to their successional trajectories over the cultivation cycle.
Implications for insect conservation
This study suggests that agricultural intensification (in terms of reduced extent of the fallow period) is associated with reduced diversity and biotic homogenization of aquatic insects compared to natural wetland and less-intensive agricultural practices in irrigated rice fields.
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Adapted from Cunha et al. (2015). W natural wetlands; RFF rice fields with fallow; RFWF rice fields without fallow
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Data availability
Macroinvertebrates are archived at the collection of Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Aquatic Ecosystems of UNISINOS University (São Leopoldo, RS, Brazil).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the private land owners that granted us the access to their properties for our research. We declare that the data collection complied with Brazilian current laws (SISBIO No. 24882-2).
Funding
This research was supported by funds from UNISINOS (#02.00.023/00-0), CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico; #473123-2010-0) and FAPERGS (PqG #02/2011). REM was granted a master scholarship from Instituto Rio Grandense do Arroz (IRGA). LM and CS hold Research Productivity grants from CNPq. MMP was granted postdoctoral fellowship by CNPq (grant number #159829/2019-4; #165529/2020-2).
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REM: Data curation, Methodology, Writing—original draft. MMP: Formal analysis, Data curation, Methodology, Visualization, Validation, Writing—original draft; Writing—review & editing. CS and LM: Conceptualization, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Project administration.
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Supplementary file1 (DOCX 47 KB)
Online Resource 1. Aquatic insect taxa recorded in rice fields (without and with fallow season) and natural wetlands over the study period. Abbreviations for environments: RFF = Rice fields with fallow; RFWF = rice fields without fallow; W = wetlands. Abbreviations of the cultivation phases: SP = soil preparation; IG = initial growth; FG = final growth; PH = post-harvest phase.
Supplementary file2 (PDF 1973 KB)
Online Resource 2. Bubble charts with the relative abundances (divided into 4 ranges) of aquatic insect taxa in sampled in each environment over the phases of rice cultivation cycle.
Supplementary file3 (TIF 3042 KB)
Online Resource 3. Stacked bar plots with the relative abundance of aquatic insect taxa in each environment. W = wetlands; RFF = rice fields with fallow; RFWF = rice fields without fallow.
Supplementary file4 (DOCX 20 KB)
Online Resource 4. Output of the undertaken statistical steps related to the model selection procedures of the generalized linear mixed-effects models (GLMM) conducted for the analysis of abundance and richness of aquatic insect communities. The codes and outputs of the models shown in this file are retrieved exactly as used in the R environment for statistical computing.
Supplementary file5 (TIF 159 KB)
Online Resource 5. (a) Boxplots of the distance to centroids and (b) differences in the mean level of group dispersions among environments. RFF; Rice fields with fallow; RFWF = rice fields without fallow; W = wetlands.
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Meneghel, R.E., Pires, M.M., Stenert, C. et al. Intensification of the rice cultivation cycle reduces the diversity of aquatic insect communities in southern Brazilian irrigated rice fields. J Insect Conserv 26, 515–524 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-022-00374-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10841-022-00374-7