The potential of electricity transmission corridors in forested areas as bumblebee habitat

Declines in pollinator abundance and diversity are not only a conservation issue, but also a threat to crop pollination. Maintained infrastructure corridors, such as those containing electricity transmission lines, are potentially important wild pollinator habitat. However, there is a lack of evidence comparing the abundance and diversity of wild pollinators in transmission corridors with other important pollinator habitats. We compared the diversity of a key pollinator group, bumblebees (Bombus spp.), between transmission corridors and the surrounding semi-natural and managed habitat types at 10 sites across Sweden’s Uppland region. Our results show that transmission corridors have no impact on bumblebee diversity in the surrounding area. However, transmission corridors and other maintained habitats such as roadsides have a level of bumblebee abundance and diversity comparable to semi-natural grasslands and host species that are important for conservation and ecosystem service provision. Under the current management regime, transmission corridors already provide valuable bumblebee habitat, but given that host plant density is the main determinant of bumblebee abundance, these areas could potentially be enhanced by establishing and maintaining key host plants. We show that in northern temperate regions the maintenance of transmission corridors has the potential to contribute to bumblebee conservation and the ecosystem services they providePeer reviewe

The Rule of Law: Measurement and Deep Roots

This paper does three things. First, based on a limited number of theoretically established dimensions, it proposes a new de facto indicator for the rule of law. It is the first such indicator to take the quality of legal norms explicitly into account. Second, using this indicator we shed new light on the relationship between the rule of law and the political system of a country. Presidential governments tend to score significantly lower on the rule of law indicator than parliamentary ones. Many presidential democracies are even outperformed by dictatorships. The observation that political systems hardly predetermine the rule of law level raises the question why the authority of law differs across societies in its capacity to constrain the behavior of public officials. Third, because of this question, we investigate the roots of the rule of law. As theory on this specific question is scarce and the rule of law is closely associated with income levels, we draw on a topical literature that deals with the fundamental causes of economic development. Our findings suggest that specific determinants of long-run development operate via the rule of law, whereas others are not related to the rule of law at all. Our empirical evidence does, however, support not only the “primacy of institutions” view, but also the important role that human capital, which European settlers brought to their colonies, played in historical economic development

Three fish

Black and white lithographed plate of three fish, two of which are Sturgeons. The top Sturgeon also has 2 extra drawings. One is the top view of the whole body. The other is of the top view of the head.From the collection of Gord Edmondso

Think Better

xv, 292 hlm.;23,5 x 15,5 c