On the relationship between farmland biodiversity and land-use intensity in Europe

By D. Kleijn, F. Kohler, A. Báldi, P. Batáry, E. Concepción, Y. Clough, Mario Díaz, Doreen Gabriel, A. Holzschuh, E. Knop and 4 more. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2009

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Worldwide agriculture is one of the main drivers of biodiversity decline. Effective conservation strategies depend on the type of relationship between biodiversity and land-use intensity, but to date the shape of this relationship is unknown. We linked plant species richness with nitrogen (N) input as an indicator of land-use intensity on 130 grasslands and 141 arable fields in six European countries. Using Poisson regression, we found that plant species richness was significantly negatively related to N input on both field types after the effects of confounding environmental factors had been accounted for. Subsequent analyses showed that exponentially declining relationships provided a better fit than linear or unimodal relationships and that this was largely the result of the response of rare species (relative cover less than 1%). Our results indicate that conservation benefits are disproportionally more costly on high-intensity than on low-intensity farmland. For example, reducing N inputs from 75 to 0 and 400 to 60 kg ha−1 yr−1 resulted in about the same estimated species gain for arable plants. Conservation initiatives are most (cost-)effective if they are preferentially implemented in extensively farmed areas that still support high levels of biodiversity.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Economics and Econometrics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/58044d2eb8368c5e545526c67783df6bd835301f

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Citations in the corpus

Losers, winners, and opportunists: How grassland land‐use intensity affects orthopteran communities (2016, background): “Intensified land use is often described to decrease biodiversity, such as plant species richness (Haddad et al. 2000, Kleijn et al. 2009) and insect diversity (Haddad et al. 2000, Allan et al. 2014).”
Agroforestry and Biodiversity (2019, background): “Fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals exert a strong impact on BD [138].”
Ecological and life-history traits predict bee species responses to environmental disturbances (2010, methodology): “We selected disturbances recognized as among those strongly affecting animal populations and biodiversity globally including habitat loss, agricultural intensification (Green et al., 2005; Fischer and Lindenmayer, 2007; Kleijn et al., 2009) and grazing.”
Optimizing agri-environment schemes for biodiversity, ecosystem services or both? (2014, background): “In contrast, another hypothesis suggests that a decelerating loss of biodiversity with increased agricultural intensity makes AES most effective in areas where biodiversity is high, since the marginal gain from a reduction in intensity is largest in these landscapes (Gabriel et al., 2010; Kleijn et ”
The role of agri-environment schemes in conservation and environmental management (2015, background): “Attwood SJ, Park SE, Maron M, Collard SJ, Robinson D, ReardonSmith KM, Cockfield G. 2009.”
Ecological impacts of early 21st century agricultural change in Europe--a review. (2009, background): “In addition, conservation benefits are disproportionally less costly on extensive farmland (Kleijn et al., 2009), and policy should therefore limit further intensification in CEECs.”
Drivers of changes in agricultural intensity in Europe (2016, background): “Like- wise, in areas with currently low- to medium-intensive agriculture policy makers may focus on strategies to sustainably intensify agriculture, but this is challenging given the substantial conservation values that some of these landscapes have (Kleijn et al., 2009; Bignal and McCracken 1996).”
The decline of moths in Great Britain: a review of possible causes (2013, background): “, 2010), targeting extensively farmed land that retains relatively high levels of biodiversity (Kleijn et al., 2009) and, conversely, focusing on ‘simple’ landscapes where agriculture already dominates and semi-natural habitats are isolated (Tscharntke et al.”