Associate Professor Cornell University Ithaca, New York
Local farm management and landscape complexity can mitigate the negative impacts of conventional agriculture on insect biodiversity and ecosystem services. The intermediate landscape complexity hypothesis predicts that local management has the greatest benefits for biodiversity and ecosystem services in intermediate landscapes. However, recent evidence suggests that local management practices can also be beneficial in simple and complex landscapes. In this review of 126 papers, we wanted to determine if certain local practices are better suited for specific landscape types to maximize biodiversity benefits. We found that individually, local and landscape factors increase biodiversity or ecosystem services about 25% of the time. The most effective local management and landscape pairings were reducing management intensity in simple landscapes and adding floral resources in intermediate landscapes. Additionally, we calculate a standardized definition of simple, intermediate, and complex landscapes across all studies. Together, this information can be used to start tailoring local management recommendations to different landscape contexts to maximize insect biodiversity and the ecosystem services they provide.
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