Conserving biodiversity in agricultural landscapes

Par Tharaka Priyadarshana (Nanyang Technological University, Singapour)

The impacts of land-use structure on biodiversity are critical to the management of agricultural systems worldwide. While landscape and crop compositional heterogeneity (diversity of land-cover types) and configurational heterogeneity (arrangement of land-cover types) are thought to benefit biodiversity in farmlands, there has been no formal synthesis of these effects across a broad range of taxa, including plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. To fill this gap, we estimated the effects of crop and landscape heterogeneity on agrobiodiversity through a global meta-analysis, covering 6397 fields across 122 studies conducted in Asia, Europe, North and South America. Results consistently reveal positive effects of crop and landscape heterogeneity for plant, invertebrate, vertebrate, pollinator, and predator biodiversity. Importantly, we showed that the positive effects of these heterogeneity components on invertebrate and vertebrate biodiversity are consistent across both tropical/sub-tropical and temperate agroecosystems, in annual and perennial cropping systems, and at small to large spatial scales. The study indicates the importance of increasing crop and landscape heterogeneity to restore biodiversity within agricultural landscapes, rather than concentrating solely on non-crop elements.

Pour en savoir plus : Priyadarshana T., Martin E, Sirami C., Woodcock B., (…) Ouin A. (…) et al. (2024) . Crop and landscape heterogeneity increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: A global review and meta‐analysis. Ecology Letters, 2024, 27 (3), https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14412