Landscape Diversification Key to Restoring Biodiversity: New Meta-analysis Delivers Decisive Evidence
A new global review provides the strongest evidence to date that diversifying crop and non-crop habitats is critical for reversing the collapse of biodiversity.
These findings challenge current mainstream approaches to meet rising global food demands, which focus on agricultural expansion and intensification. While these strategies have dramatically increased short-term food production, they come at a high cost to biodiversity and the health of habitats worldwide. Unsurprisingly, governments and environmental stakeholders around the world are increasingly calling for farming strategies that provide win-win outcomes for food production and biodiversity.
Writing in the journal Ecology Letters, a network of ecologists led by researchers at the Asian School of the Environment at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore used data from Asia, Europe, and North and South America to understand how the heterogeneity, or complexity, of landscapes affects a wide range of agricultural wildlife, including vertebrates and invertebrates.
The authors, from Asia, Europe, and the UK, conducted a meta-analysis on a data set spanning 6,397 farm fields and 24 countries. The analysis showed consistently positive effects of landscape heterogeneity on the biodiversity of plants, invertebrates, vertebrates, pollinators, and predators in agricultural systems. In particular, increasing the diversity of both crop and non-crop habitats across landscapes was key to supporting biodiversity.
Senior author Associate Professor Eleanor Slade from Nanyang Technological University explained, “Our study demonstrates that maintaining diverse crop and non-crop habitats within agricultural landscapes is important for agricultural biodiversity on a global scale. This finding holds significant implications and provides valuable insights for policymakers, land managers, and conservationists. By prioritising strategies that promote crop and landscape heterogeneity, stakeholders can help preserve biodiversity and also support sustainable agricultural practices.”
“We found that some organisms, like vertebrates and plants, really benefit from having non-crop habitats in the landscape,” added Tharaka S. Priyadarshana, lead author and PhD student at Nanyang Technological University. “Agricultural systems are often managed to maximise their production in the economic sense. But by adapting farming practices and rethinking the way we integrate crop and non-crop habitats, they can also be managed to minimise environmental issues and maximise important services like pollination and pest control that boost crop production.”
Notably, this is the first time a study has demonstrated consistent positive biodiversity effects across tropical and temperate regions, and different kinds of cropping systems. This suggests that increasing the diversity of crops and semi-natural habitats, as the authors urge, could serve as a generalised strategy to support biodiversity across agricultural systems worldwide. The implications of these findings are particularly timely in the context of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which runs from 2021-2030 and aims to halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide.
“This study is very important in the crucial results it shows for a wide range of organisms, such as invertebrate predators and pollinators which play key roles in agriculture,” noted Professor Emily Martin of the University of Giessen, Germany, who is second author of the study. “The evidence is clear: maintaining the biodiversity support system for production of food, energy, and feed goes hand in hand with learning how to diversify farmed landscapes globally.”
The full article "Crop and landscape heterogeneity increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: A global review and meta-analysis," can be found at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ele.14412.
Written by: Lauren Snyder