b'CAN FARMERS IMPROVE CROP PRODUCTION AND CONSERVE BIODIVERSITY?DUALLY-BENEFICIAL HABITATS ARE STRENGTHENING MORE RESILIENT BIODIVERSITY.BY: MARCEL BRUINS A s you look across fields today, you are more often being greeted by a surprising sight. Instead of just seeing the crop, youll often see purposefully sown flowers to delight your senses and serve and important purpose: create a habitat for pollinators.Take time to learn more about the usefulness of this prac-tice and what other measures are best to implement within arable land. European Seed recently sat down with Annik Dollacker, co-author of the published article Dually beneficial habitats serve as a practical biodiversity mainstreaming tool in European crop production, to get her take on how strips or even entire fields of flowers can serve and important purpose in re-energizing pollinator health.EUROPEAN SEED (ES): ANNIK, CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN A NUTSHELL WHAT YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT WAS ALL ABOUT? ANNIK DOLLACKER (AD):Indeed, flower strips are the most popular and visible measure implemented and intended to sup-port biodiversity within fields. However, whether this or other measures recommended for use within arable field crops con-tribute to serving biodiversity and farming alike is a question that is rarely researched. Mostly ecological enhancement measures have been developed and well evaluated as to their benefits to specific species, or to protect single species for their aesthetic or intrinsic value. The measures cost and benefit considerations to farm-ing, however, are still limited. Our research project included authors and contributors who represent a diversity of sciences to elucidate the broader considerations. Sciences represented included agriculture, soil, crop produc-tion and protection, policy, landscape ecology, biodiver-sity, and ecosystem services. We undertook to analysing the existing, exhaustive literature on a wide range of ecological enhancement measures and to identify which of them provided value for use on European farmland holdings in addition to bio-diversity benefits. To that end, we focused on easily implementa-ble measures in the key arable field crops (cereals, including maize; oilseed rape; sunflower and soya), which make up 72 per cent of European (EU-27) arable crop land and on the meas-ures impact on crop production-relevant agro-ecosystem ser-vices (e.g., soil fertility, pollination, pest control) (see table 1). These agro-ecosystem services are delivered by soil organisms, pollinators, and natural enemies of pests. Our paper identified Annik Dollacker those measures, which may support agro-ecosystem services provision upon which crop management depends and which at 14IEUROPEAN SEEDIEUROPEAN-SEED.COM'