European agroforestry has no unequivocal effect on biodiversity: a time-cumulative meta-analysis
| Main Authors: | Mupepele, Anne-Christine, Keller, Matteo, Dormann, Carsten F. |
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| Format: | Article Journal |
| Terbitan: |
, 2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: |
https://zenodo.org/record/5595479 |
Daftar Isi:
- Background: Agroforestry is a production system combining trees with crops or livestock. It has the potential to increase biodiversity in relation to single-use systems, such as pastures or cropland, by providing a higher habitat heterogeneity. In a literature review and subsequent meta-analysis, we investigated the relationship between biodiversity and agroforestry and critically appraised the underlying evidence of the results.Results: Overall, there was no benefit of agroforestry to biodiversity. A time-cumulative meta-analysis demonstrated the robustness of this result between 1991 and 2019. In a more nuanced view silvopastoral systems were not more diverse in relation to forests, pastures or abandoned silvopastures. However, silvoarable systems increased biodiversity compared to cropland by 60%. A subgroup analysis showed that bird and arthropod diversity increased in agroforestry systems, while bats, plants and fungi did not.Conclusion: Agroforestry increases biodiversity only in silvoarable systems in relation to cropland. But even this result is of small magnitude, and single-study effect sizes were heterogeneous with sometimes opposing conclusions. The heterogeneity suggests the importance of other, usually unmeasured variables, such as landscape parameters or land-use history, influencing biodiversity in agroforestry systems.