Abstract
Agricultural intensification is a well-known driver of biodiversity loss. Crop diversity and its changes over space and time drive land use intensity and impact biodiversity of agricultural landscapes, while meeting the growing demand for human food and nutrition resources. Loss of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes reduces primary productivity and soil health and erodes a range of other ecosystem services. At present, while having partial understanding of many processes, we lack a general synthesis of our knowledge of the links between crop diversity and biodiversity. 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 type on the biological diversity of fauna and flora in agricultural landscapes. Response variables 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 researcher and a subset will be independently carried out by a second researcher for quality control. Study quality and risk of bias will be assessed. Evidence will first be mapped to 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 intensity are recognised as the primary drivers of biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes
Relationships between crop diversity and the biodiversity of flora and fauna are less clear and synthesis of the current literature may provide useful insights to help inform the debate on land use trade-offs related to future food production
For the papers identified for inclusion in the review, data coded and extracted will include the following: authors, year, publication, study location, study design, scale, biodiversity metric, species/taxa, crop type, crop diversity, duration of intervention, number of crop rotations, effect sizes, standard deviations, sample sizes, biome, ecoregion, climatic zone, field size, and other agricultural management, landscape, environmental and climatological factors
Summary
This protocol has been updated in response to reviewer comments. As the number of syntheses on microbial responses to crop diversity has increased to a total of four -- including two new publications since this protocol was first published -- we have opted to reduce the scope of this review to include biodiversity responses among flora and fauna, excluding microbes
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