The impacts of land-use structure on biodiversity are critical to the management of agricultural systems worldwide. While spatial compositional heterogeneity (diversity of land-cover types) and configurational heterogeneity (arrangement of land-cover types) are thought to benefit biodiversity, there has been no formal synthesis of these effects across a broad range of taxa, including microbiota, plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Our meta-analysis provides the strongest evidence to date that increased compositional and configurational spatial heterogeneity within intensively managed farming landscapes (averaging 75% cropped area) affects biodiversity (see Figures 1–2). Our findings are distinctive due to the broad geographical area covered and the inclusion of numerous taxa, as well as key ecosystem service-providing functional groups (pollinators and natural enemies of pests). Moreover, we assessed the impact of spatial heterogeneity by examining its impact on biodiversity through both crop and non-crop cover types. This is the first time such a synthesis has been performed and an area for which no consensus is yet available. We demonstrate that both crop types and manageable non-crop elements within the agricultural landscapes are important for agroecosystem biodiversity. Thus, the historical approach of focusing only on non-crop elements to support agroecosystem biodiversity is shown to only provide a part of the solution. For the first time, we also show that the positive effects of these heterogeneity components on invertebrate and vertebrate biodiversity are consistent in both tropical/sub-tropical and temperate agroecosystems, and in annual and perennial cropping systems and at small to large spatial scales. This suggests that increasing spatial heterogeneity based on these heterogeneity components could be a generalized strategy to support biodiversity across various agroecosystems globally.
Figure 1. Estimated average Pearson's correlation coefficients among heterogeneity components and invertebrate, excluding pests, biodiversity, with 90% (thicker bars) and 95% (thinner bars) confidence intervals (CIs). The number of correlations and studies (in parentheses) included for each estimation are displayed beside the upper bound of the 95% CIs. Asterisks indicate level of the statistical significance (*p-value <0.05, p-value <0.01, *p-value <0.001). The dashed line indicates the zero x-axis intercept.
Figure 2. Estimated average Pearson's correlation coefficients among heterogeneity components and vertebrate, excluding pests, biodiversity, with 90% (thicker bars) and 95% (thinner bars) confidence intervals (CIs). Other details analogous to those in Figure 1.
For more details, check out our paper published in Ecology Letters, at http://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14412
How to cite this article: Priyadarshana, T.S., Martin, E.A., Sirami, C., Woodcock, B.A., Goodale, E., Martínez-Núñez, C., Lee, M-B., Pagani-Núñez, E., Raderschall, C.A., Brotons, L., Rege, A., Ouin, A., Tscharntke, T., Slade, E.M. (2024) Crop and landscape heterogeneity increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: A global review and meta-analysis. Ecology Letters, 27, e14412. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.14412
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