Abstract

Biodiversity loss-one of the most prominent forms of modern environmental change-has been heavily driven by terrestrial habitat loss and, in particular, the spread and intensification of agriculture. Expanding agricultural land-use has led to the search for strong conservation strategies, with some suggesting that biodiversity conservation in agriculture is best maximized by reducing local management intensity, such as fertilizer and pesticide application. Others highlight the importance of landscape-level approaches that incorporate natural or semi-natural areas in landscapes surrounding farms. Here, we show that both of these practices are valuable to the conservation of biodiversity, and that either local or landscape factors can be most crucial to conservation planning depending on which types of organisms one wishes to save. We performed a quantitative review of 266 observations taken from 31 studies that compared the impacts of localized (within farm) management strategies and landscape complexity (around farms) on the richness and abundance of plant, invertebrate and vertebrate species in agro-ecosystems. While both factors significantly impacted species richness, the richness of sessile plants increased with less-intensive local management, but did not significantly respond to landscape complexity. By contrast, the richness of mobile vertebrates increased with landscape complexity, but did not significantly increase with less-intensive local management. Invertebrate richness and abundance responded to both factors. Our analyses point to clear differences in how various groups of organisms respond to differing scales of management, and suggest that preservation of multiple taxonomic groups will require multiple scales of conservation.

Keywords

agri-environmental schemes; agroecology; sustainable agriculture; intensification; landscape complexity; organic farming

Published in

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
2014, Volume: 281, number: 1791, article number: 20141358

SLU Authors

• Sjögren, Jörgen

  • Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture


UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science
Ecology


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.1358

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/60922