Bees are important pollinators that use resources from both cropped and natural habitats in agroecosystems, and the amount of extant resources have proven to be critical in the adoption of parental investment decisions. Thus, the mixed effects that resource distribution and the organisms’ foraging and dispersal movements have on parental decisions cannot be adequately evaluated without the use of different spatial scales. We assess the effects of the landscape context and the local habitat type on the offspring traits of Osmia caerulescens L. Bees were obtained from standardized trap-nests established in Mediterranean crops. We analyzed the effects that the percentage of semi-natural habitats, the local habitat type, and the nest hole diameter have on offspring weight, the number of emergent progeny and offspring sex ratio. Both landscape and local scale factors affected the offspring traits in significant and interactive ways, and landscape-scale effects varied depending on local factors. Considering our results and taking into account the implications that offspring traits have on the population persistence, we stress the need to introduce these parameters in future studies. Maintaining agricultural landscape heterogeneity, with high crop diversity and the presence of semi-natural habitats is essential for the persistence of Osmia caerulescens populations.

Habitat properties, including crop type, farming system, management practices, or topographic features such as the hillside aspect, may act as environmental filters that select organisms sharing traits compatible with those conditions. The more environmentally-friendly management practices implemented in organic farming seem to benefit a range of taxa, but the extent of those benefits is not well understood. In cherry orchards of the Jerte Valley (Extremadura, western Spain), we explored the response of spider assemblages to the farming system (organic and conventional) and the hillside aspect (sunny or shady) from a taxonomical, behavioral, and morphological perspective. Spiders from both the canopy and soil surface were collected and identified to family. According to their foraging strategy, spiders were sorted in guilds and, for a selected family in each guild, body size was measured on each captured individual. Spider traits and composition were determined by local factors derived from farming system, and by climate conditions associated to the hillside aspect. In taxonomical terms, spiders benefit from organic farming and by the shady aspect. However, from a behavioral perspective, spiders with different foraging strategies exhibit strong variations in their response to the evaluated factors. From a morphological perspective, body size within guilds is differently conditioned by management practices that constitute conditioning disturbance events for each guild, resulting in selecting small individuals. The observed differences in taxonomical, behavioral, and morphological responses of spider communities to habitat properties highlight the importance of examining their assemblages from different perspectives when assessing how they respond to changes in management practices and topographic features.