Multi-community effects of organic and conventional farming practices in vineyards

Noémie Ostandie,Brice Giffard,Denis Thiéry,Adrien Rusch,Olivier Bonnard,Benjamin Joubard,Sylvie Richart-Cervera

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-91095-5

Abstract

Understanding the response of biodiversity to organic farming is crucial to design more sustainable agriculture. While it is known that organic farming benefits biodiversity on average, large variability in the effects of this farming system exists. Moreover, it is not clear how different practices modulate the performance of organic farming for biodiversity conservation. In this study, we investigated how the abundance and taxonomic richness of multiple species groups responds to certified organic farming and conventional farming in vineyards. Our analyses revealed that farming practices at the field scale are more important drivers of community abundance than landscape context. Organic farming enhanced the abundances of springtails (+ 31.6%) and spiders (+ 84%), had detrimental effects on pollinator abundance (− 11.6%) and soil microbial biomass (− 9.1%), and did not affect the abundance of ground beetles, mites or microarthropods. Farming practices like tillage regime, insecticide use and soil copper content drove most of the detected effects of farming system on biodiversity. Our study revealed varying effects of organic farming on biodiversity and clearly indicates the need to consider farming practices to understand the effects of farming systems on farmland biodiversity.

Highlights

Understanding the response of biodiversity to organic farming is crucial to design more sustainable agriculture
Organic farming at the field scale was the most important variable explaining spider abundance, as it accounted for 73% of the variance explained by the model, while it explained 18% of the explained variance for the abundance of pollinators (R2m = 38%), 17% of the explained variance for soil microbial biomass (R2m = 57%) and 10% of the explained variance for the abundance of springtails (R2m = 64%) (Fig. 1)
Among the seven groups studied, organic farming at the field scale enhanced the abundances of springtails (+ 31.6%) and spiders (+ 84%), had detrimental effects on pollinator abundance (- 11.6%) and soil microbial biomass (- 9.1%), and did not affect the abundance of ground beetles, mites or microarthropods

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the response of biodiversity to organic farming is crucial to design more sustainable agriculture. While it is known that organic farming benefits biodiversity on average, large variability in the effects of this farming system exists. It is not clear how different practices modulate the performance of organic farming for biodiversity conservation. Several studies have reported that the effects of organic farming are highly variable, and recent evidence even pinpointed that organic farming could have negative effects on some biodiversity components [13,17,18,19]. Examining how multiple species or functional groups respond to organic farming is of major importance to understand the actual effects of this popular agri-environment measure on biodiversity. Analyzing the impacts of farming practices on multitrophic biodiversity is a necessary step to understand the variable performance of organic farming and to set the scene for the ecological intensification of farming systems

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Conclusion