With the human population continuing to rise, it is likely that agricultural areas will need to be intensified and/or expanded to meet future food demands. This will likely have a negative impact on biodiversity, which is essential for agriculture since it provides fundamental services such as pollination and pest control. There is a clear need to better understand the drivers of biodiversity within agricultural areas so that benefits can be maintained for both conservation and food production. In this global study, we ask: i) what are the key landscape characteristics that influence local biodiversity, and ii) how do responses differ between cropland and natural habitat? We assess how three metrics of biodiversity: species richness, abundance and average community range size, differ in their response to landscape characteristics such as distance to forest and percentage of natural habitat in the landscape using mixed-effects models and the PREDICTS database.
Results/Conclusions
We find that distance to forest and the percentage of natural habitat in the surrounding landscape have the greatest impact on biodiversity. At 25 km from dense forest, there was a 20% reduction in species richness in all land uses, compared with areas immediately next to forest. Additionally, increases of 55% in species richness and 115% in abundance are estimated when percentage natural habitat increases from 0 to 100% in the surrounding environment. These variables also influence the composition of local assemblages: changes in the average community range size indicate that narrow-ranged species are filtered out of local sites when there are reductions in surrounding natural habitat or as distance to forest increases. Our results show that maintaining natural habitats in the landscapes surrounding agricultural areas is essential for maintaining local biodiversity. This will have particular relevance for maintaining biodiversity within cropland under future land-use change to ensure the continued provision of essential ecosystem services.