Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2008; Royal Society; Volume: 276; Issue: 1658 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1098/rspb.2008.1509

1471-2954

David Kleijn, Florian Köhler, András Báldi, Péter Batáry, Elena D. Concepción, Yann Clough, Mario Dı́az, Doreen Gabriel, Andrea Holzschuh, Eva Knop, Attila Kovács, E. J. P. Marshall, Teja Tscharntke, Jort Verhulst,

Plant and animal studies

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.