Landscape greening and local creation of wildflower strips and hedgerows promote multiple ecosystem services

1. The explicit and implicit aims of creating ecological focus areas (EFAs) and implementing greening measures in European agro-ecosystems include the promotion of regulatory ecosystem services (ES) to sustain crop production in conventional cropping systems. However, the extent to which these goals are achieved with current policy measures remains poorly explored.
2. We measured insect-mediated pollination and natural pest control service provisioning in 18 winter oilseed rape fields as a function of the independent and interactive effects of local EFA establishment ─ sown wildflower strips and hedgerows ─ and landscape-scale greening measures within a 1 km radius around focal fields and quantified their contribution to crop yield.
3. Insect pollination potential and pest predation increased on average by 10 and 13%, respectively, when landscape-scale greening measures share was increased from 6 to 26%. For pollination, the increase was stronger in fields adjoining an EFA (14%) tha...