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Biodiversity degradation is a national and global problem which is interconnected with land use and climate change. All these are major unsolved questions and their interactions are only partly understood. Agriculture and especially cattle farming is under keen societal focus because of its significant role in soil carbon losses, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and biodiversity preservation. We reviewed the Finnish scientific literature to assess the impact of intensive contra extensive grass production on biodiversity using vascular plants, vertebrates, invertebrates and soil biota. Still a few decades ago, mixed farming was prevailing almost everywhere in Finland, but nowadays cereal production is essentially clustered in the southwest and milk and beef production in the northeast. This is reflected in the distribution of intensive (connected with cattle) and extensive grasslands (both types of farming). The bird community was most abundant and species rich in farmland which provides small fields in large blocks of farmland and many kinds of crops, including both intensive and extensive grasslands. Overall permanent grasslands with rather simply vegetation diversity can maintain a diverse community of spiders and leafhoppers, and act as overwintering habitat for polyphagous predators in field ecosystems. The ecological requirement of all species and species groups are probably never met at one site and consequently target should be in having differently managed areas at regional scale. For some of the taxa, ecosystem services could be indicated, but a research-based quantitative assessment is available only for carbon sequestration and weak impact of dung-beetles in diminishing GHG emissions from cow pats. Our review demonstrated that quite much is known about biodiversity in extensively managed grasslands, but very little in intensively managed grasslands. An important question is whether there is some threshold for the proportion of grasslands under which regional biodiversity will be reduced. Intensive production offers limited value to replace the high biodiversity value of semi-natural pastures.

International audience; Puumala virus is an RNA virus hosted by the bank vole (Myodes glareolus) and is today present in most European countries. Whilst it is generally accepted that hantaviruses have been tightly co-evolving with their hosts, Puumala virus (PUUV) evolutionary history is still controversial and so far has not been studied at the whole European level. This study attempts to reconstruct the phylogeographical spread of modern PUUV throughout Europe during the last postglacial period in the light of an upgraded dataset of complete PUUV small (S) segment sequences and by using most recent computational approaches. Taking advantage of the knowledge on the past migrations of its host, we identified at least three potential independent dispersal routes of PUUV during postglacial recolonization of Europe by the bank vole. From the Alpe-Adrian region (Balkan, Austria, and Hungary) to Western European countries (Germany, France, Belgium, and Netherland), and South Scandinavia. From the vicinity of Carpathian Mountains to the Baltic countries and to Poland, Russia, and Finland. The dissemination towards Denmark and North Scandinavia is more hypothetical and probably involved several independent streams from south and north Fennoscandia.

The spatial genetic structure of common hamsters (Cricetus cricetus) was investigated using three partial mitochondrial (mt) genes and 11 nuclear microsatellite loci. All marker systems revealed significant population differentiation across Europe. Hamsters in central and western Europe belong largely to two allopatric mitochondrial lineages south and northwest of the Carpathian and Sudetes. The southern group, 'Pannonia', comprises populations inside the Carpathian basin (Czech Republic, Hungary) while the second group, 'North', includes hamsters from Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Isolation of the lineages is maintained by a combination of geographical and ecological barriers. Both main phylogeographical groups show signs of further subdivision. North is separated into highly polymorphic central German and less polymorphic western populations, which most likely split during late glacial expansion (15,000-10,000 bp). Clock estimates based on haplotype distributions predict a divergence of the two major lineages 85,000-147,000 bp. Expansion times fall during the last glaciation (115,000-10,000 bp) corroborating fossil data, which identify Cricetus cricetus as characteristic of colder climatic phases. Despite the allopatry of mt haplotypes, there is an overlap of nuclear microsatellite alleles between phylogeographical units. Although there are strong evidence that Pannonian hamsters have persisted inside the Carpathian basin over the last 50,000 years, genetic differentiation among European hamsters has mainly been caused by immigration from different eastern refugia. Possible source populations are likely to be found in the Ukrainian and the southern Russian plains--core areas of hamster distribution. From there, hamsters have repeatedly expanded during the Quaternary.