HEAVEN aims to evaluate the role of non-crop habitats in agricultural landscapes in supporting carabid communities and the associated ecosystem services they provide (i.e., biological control of pests and weeds). This will be achieved through a combination of novel analytical tools (i.e., functional redundancy and ecological network analyses) and laboratory experiments organised in five work packages (WPs). First, we will evaluate the vulnerability of the carabid community to species loss resulting from non-crop habitat loss by measuring functional redundancy (WP1). Second, we will identify the relationship between carabid species and multiple non-crop habitats (i.e., habitat preference) in landscapes with different levels of complexity throughout the year (WP2). Third, we will investigate the link between the nutritional status of carabids in different habitats (i.e., an indicator of resource use) and fitness (i.e., overwintering survival rate, WP3) and ecosystem service provision (WP4). Moreover, we will develop widespread monitoring tools to quantify ecosystem services provided by carabids (WP5).



Figure 1: Project structure and interlinkages between WPs. Continuous lines indicate direct effects of the landscape types and selected non-crop habitats on specific aspects of the carabid community (i.e., functional redundancy, habitat preference, nutritional status, overwintering survival rate, ecosystem service provision), while dashed lines indicate indirect effects.