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

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

Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Kleijn, D., Kohler, F., Báldi, A., Batáry, P., Concepción, E.D., Clough, Y., Diaz, M., Gabriel, D., Holzschuh, A., Knop, E., Marshall, E.J.P., Tscharntke, T., Verhulst, J.
Format:	Article/Letter to editor biblioteca
Language:	English
Subjects:	agri-environment schemes, agricultural intensification, areas, bird populations, conservation, diversity, landscape, scale, set, species richness,
Online Access:	https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/on-the-relationship-between-farmland-biodiversity-and-land-use-in
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!