Farmland biodiversity: wildflower-sown islands within arable fields and grassy field margins both promote spider diversity

Agricultural intensification and the concomitant landscape homogenization is leading to a worldwide decline in farmland biodiversity. Non-crop habitats in agroecosystems may counteract the loss of arthropods such as spiders and thus contribute to sustainable agriculture. However, the effectiveness of field margins and set-aside wildflower-sown patches in maintaining spider diversity is not well understood. Here, we investigated the effects of three different non-crop habitats, namely field margins, set-aside wildflower-sown patches under power poles (‘power pole islands’), and grassland fallows on spider diversity as compared to wheat fields in an agricultural landscape in western Germany. Using pitfall trapping and suction sampling, we show that species richness and overall conservation value were higher in non-crop habitats than in wheat fields. Interestingly, field margins and power pole islands differed from long-term grassland fallows only in conservation value, which was significantly higher in grassland fallows. Species assemblages differed considerably between grassland fallows, field margins and power pole islands, and wheat fields, documenting the added value of using different conservation strategies. Implications for insect conservation Small-scale non-crop habitats adjacent to wheat fields were surprisingly effective in promoting spider diversity in an agricultural landscape, with field margins and power pole islands being equally effective. To maximize overall diversity in agricultural landscapes, we propose a combination of larger long-term fallows and smaller non-crop habitats such as field margins or set-aside wildflower-sown patches.

Research on Determining the Inspection Point of Multirotor UAV Power Tower

During the inspection process of power pole towers, manual positioning is mainly used to select the shooting viewpoints of the drone, which leads to erroneous viewpoint selection and inaccurate shootings of inspected objects. Also, neglecting the effect of the sun’s backlight on photographs contributes to poor photo quality that does not meet inspection requirements. Aiming at the selection of shooting viewpoints during multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles’ inspection on power poles, this paper proposes an automatic positioning method that determines the shooting viewpoints by considering UAV performance, airborne camera parameters, and the size of objects to be measured. Considering the factors of sun illumination, we optimize the method to ensure the positions of the viewpoints and to ensure that the images can be clearly generated so that the observers can check the power pole towers through the images when shooting is also taken into consideration. Finally, the automatic calculation method of the related viewpoints is implemented in the Java language. Experiments show that the method can accurately obtain the positions of the drones’ viewpoints and reduce the number of viewpoints, which significantly improves the efficiency and quality of inspection shooting.