Abstract
The diversification of cropping systems encompasses different strategies that may help maintain or enhance the sustainability of agriculture. Thousands of experiments have been carried out around the world since almost five decades to evaluate and compare the performances of various diversification strategies in a wide array of agroecosystems and climates. Although these analyses have been synthesized in a growing number of meta-analyses, the information remains somewhat fragmented. A multicriteria systematic synthesis of worldwide agricultural diversification is still lacking. Here, we review all meta-analyses conducted on crop diversification strategies and produce a detailed overview of their results and of their quality. We identified and analyzed 99 meta-analyses summarizing the results of more than 3700 agronomic experiments on seven crop diversification strategies. Among these strategies, rotation and associated plant species are dominant in the literature followed by intercropping, agroforestry and landscape heterogeneity. Our analysis reveals that rotation and intercropping are associated with yield increases. Agroforestry systematically induces an improvement of biodiversity and soil quality—in particular soil organic carbon. We show that, regardless of the context, a combination of several diversification strategies outperforms any individual strategy. Our review reveals that a significant knowledge gap remains, in particular regarding water use, farmers’ profitability, product quality and production stability. Few meta-analyses investigate the performance of landscape heterogeneity and of systems with species other than cereals and pulses. Additionally, we show that most of the meta-analyses studied cannot be considered fully transparent and reproducible. Their conclusions should therefore be interpreted with caution. Our systematic mapping provides a benchmark to guide and improve the relevance and reliability of future meta-analyses in agronomy.
Highlights
The wide range of strategies aiming at incorporating agrobiodiversity in cropping systems and the heterogeneity in the quality of the studies hampers a simple synthesis on this subject
Our systematic synthesis reveals that a large majority of the quantitative estimates reported in the literature support the idea that diversification strategies have positive impacts on production and the environment, in rice, maize and wheat cropping systems, which represent ∼34% of the species mentioned in the primary studies
We found that combining several crop diversification strategies, in particular rotation combined with agroforestry or rotation combined with associated plants, improves the productive performances of cropping systems, as observed by Rosa-Schleich et al (2019)
Summary
More sustainable and climate-resilient farming systems are needed to decrease the impact of agriculture on the biosphere and ensure a stable food supply for the coming decades Addressing these issues by reconsidering the simplification of agro-ecosystems — especially in highly intensified systems which are often based on one or on a limited number of cultivated species — is one pathway explored by farmers and agronomists. Meta-analysis is a transparent and reproducible method which allows to estimate the effects of a treatment (i.e., here the effect of a given crop diversification strategy compared to a less-diversified cropping system) Note that these summary effects can here be useful both for studying the consequences of the diversification of simplified systems and of the simplification of diversified systems
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