Abstract
Agricultural intensification is a well-known driver of biodiversity loss. Diversity of crop production over space and time reduces land use intensity and may mitigate impacts on biodiversity while contributing to growing demand for human food and nutrition resources. Crop species are also known to have independent impacts on biodiversity. To date, reviews synthesising our knowledge of crop species and crop diversity-biodiversity links are missing. We will therefore conduct a systematic review by searching multiple agriculture, ecology and environmental science databases (e.g. Web of Science, Geobase, Agris, AGRICOLA, GreenFILE) to identify studies reporting the impacts of crop diversity and crop species on the biological diversity of fauna, flora and microbes in agricultural landscapes. Outcomes will include metrics of species richness, abundance, assemblage, community composition and species rarity. Screening, data coding and data extraction will be carried out by one reviewer and a proportion will be independently conducted by a second reviewer. Study quality and risk of bias will be assessed. Evidence will first be mapped by species/taxa then assessed for further narrative or statistical synthesis based on comparability of results and likely robustness. Gaps in the evidence base will also be identified with a view toward future research and policy directions for nutrition, food systems and ecology.
Highlights
Land use and land use change are recognised as the primary drivers of biodiversity loss
Agricultural intensification factors that have been well researched in relation to biodiversity include landscape heterogeneity[2,3,4], use of pesticides[5,6,7] and fertilisers[8,9,10], and ploughing[11,12]
Crop diversification has been proposed as a management practice that may reduce some of the environmental impacts of modern farming related to fertiliser and pesticide use and mitigate food production-biodiversity trade-offs13 – namely, that conventional high-input intensification of agricultural land use reduces conversion of natural habitats and decreases biodiversity[14,15]
Summary
Land use and land use change are recognised as the primary drivers of biodiversity loss. Differences in crop species are known to have independent impacts on biodiversity, for example, that of wheat on soil microbial diversity[17] or fruit orchards on bird abundance[18] Evidence of these relationships has not yet been mapped or synthesised. Rare species richness and relative species rarity are thought to capture aspects of biodiversity related to functional and phylogenetic diversity[20,21] These measurements are practical and individually capture important, if incomplete, dimensions of biodiversity; they are the most used in the environmental sciences. 2. Aim and objectives The aim of this review is to answer the primary research question: “What are the effects of spatial and temporal crop diversity and of individual crop species on the biological diversity of fauna, flora and microbes in agricultural landscapes?”.
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