| dc.description.abstract | Agricultural intensification is a leading cause of global biodiversity loss, which can
reduce the provisioning of ecosystem services in managed ecosystems. Organic
farming and plant diversification are farm management schemes that may mitigate
potential ecological harm by increasing species richness and boosting related
ecosystem services to agroecosystems. What remains unclear is the extent to which
farm management schemes affect biodiversity components other than species rich-
ness, and whether impacts differ across spatial scales and landscape contexts. Using
a global metadata set, we quantified the effects of organic farming and plant diversi-
fication on abundance, local diversity (communities within fields), and regional diver-
sity (communities across fields) of arthropod pollinators, predators, herbivores, and
detritivores. Both organic farming and higher in-field plant diversity enhanced
arthropod abundance, particularly for rare taxa. This resulted in increased richness
but decreased evenness. While these responses were stronger at local relative to
regional scales, richness and abundance increased at both scales, and richness on
farms embedded in complex relative to simple landscapes. Overall, both organic
farming and in-field plant diversification exerted the strongest effects on pollinators
and predators, suggesting these management schemes can facilitate ecosystem ser-
vice providers without augmenting herbivore (pest) populations. Our results suggest
that organic farming and plant diversification promote diverse arthropod metacom-
munities that may provide temporal and spatial stability of ecosystem service provi-
sioning. Conserving diverse plant and arthropod communities in farming systems
therefore, requires sustainable practices that operate both within fields and across
landscapes. | en_US |
