Original data comes from a project which takes or took place as part of the DFG priority program "Exploratories for large-scale and long-term functional biodiversity research". The data is stored together with descriptive metadata, in combination called a dataset, in the project repository (https://www.bexis.uni-jena.de). Species information was extracted from that original dataset. The second paragraph is part of the metadata of the original dataset. Ecosystem services like pollination are affected by a variety of factors in agricultural used landscapes. This study was conducted to investigate the effects of land use intensity, local management and landscape context on the abundance and diversity of flower visiting wild bees and hoverflies.
25 years ago, Grime (1977) and Southwood (1977) published the first habitat templets to describe relationships between environmental parameters and life history strategies. This has subsequently lead to a changing worldview of ecology in forcing ecologists to study the organism-in-its-environment and not as a closed system (Korfiatis and Stamou 1999, Statzner et al. 2001). We are interested in exploring relationships between biological traits of hoverflies and the environmental constraints that have to lead their evolution and test the application of this knowledge for environmental assessment. This study aims to: 1. explore the relationships between life history traits and environmental variables in hoverflies. 2. group species of hoverflies to functional groups with similar life history traits. The aim in forming functional groups is to represent the ecological structure of a fauna, and perhaps to use that structure to make predictions at a lavel that is more practicable and more general than the level of individual species, but that enables better prediction than the level of all the species. 3. make suggestions for the use of hoverfly functional groups for environmental assessment. Investigations are carried out at a study site in the floodplain of the river Elbe in central Germany. Using Malaise trps, 35 sites were surveyed in 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2003. The environmental parameters recorded on the same sites were: height above sealevel (as an approximation of inundation frequency), macrohabitats, microhabitats (e.g. structures like dead wood or ant nests), distance from the course of the Elbe and relevant habitats and soil parameters. Life history trait information is taken from the 'Syrph the net'- Database of European Syrphidae (Speght et al. 2001). Data analysis uses explorative multivariate statistics (CA, PCA, Co-intertia) and Monte-Carlo-Procedures.