articleProceedings of the National Academy of SciencesJul 29, 2019BRONZE OA

Increasing crop heterogeneity enhances multitrophic diversity across agricultural regions

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique · École Pratique des Hautes Études · +35 more institutions

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Abstract

Agricultural landscape homogenization has detrimental effects on biodiversity and key ecosystem services. Increasing agricultural landscape heterogeneity by increasing seminatural cover can help to mitigate biodiversity loss. However, the amount of seminatural cover is generally low and difficult to increase in many intensively managed agricultural landscapes. We hypothesized that increasing the heterogeneity of the crop mosaic itself (hereafter "crop heterogeneity") can also have positive effects on biodiversity. In 8 contrasting regions of Europe and North America, we selected 435 landscapes along independent gradients of crop diversity and mean field size. Within each landscape, we selected 3 sampling sites…

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