Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity across Europe
Maria A. Tsiafouli,Elisa Thébault,Stefanos P. Sgardelis,Peter C. de Ruiter,Wim H. van der Putten,Klaus Birkhofer,Lia Hemerik,Franciska T. de Vries,Richard D. Bardgett,Mark Brady,Lisa Bjørnlund,Helene Bracht Jørgensen,Soren Christensen,Tina D’ Hertefeldt,Stefan Hotes,Stefan Hotes,W. H. Gera Hol,Jan Frouz,Mira Liiri,Simon R. Mortimer,Heikki Setälä,Joseph Tzanopoulos,Karoline Uteseny,Václav Pižl,Josef Stary,Volkmar Wolters,Katarina Hedlund +26 more
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TLDR
Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity, making soil food webs less diverse and composed of smaller bodied organisms, and how changes in soil biodiversity due to land-use intensification may threaten the functioning of soil in agricultural production systems is discussed.Abstract:
Soil biodiversity plays a key role in regulating the processes that underpin the delivery of ecosystem goods and services in terrestrial ecosystems. Agricultural intensification is known to change the diversity of individual groups of soil biota, but less is known about how intensification affects biodiversity of the soil food web as a whole, and whether or not these effects may be generalized across regions. We examined biodiversity in soil food webs from grasslands, extensive, and intensive rotations in four agricultural regions across Europe: in Sweden, the UK, the Czech Republic and Greece. Effects of land-use intensity were quantified based on structure and diversity among functional groups in the soil food web, as well as on community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. We also elucidate land-use intensity effects on diversity of taxonomic units within taxonomic groups of soil fauna. We found that between regions soil food web diversity measures were variable, but that increasing land-use intensity caused highly consistent responses. In particular, land-use intensification reduced the complexity in the soil food webs, as well as the community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. In all regions across Europe, species richness of earthworms, Collembolans, and oribatid mites was negatively affected by increased land-use intensity. The taxonomic distinctness, which is a measure of taxonomic relatedness of species in a community that is independent of species richness, was also reduced by land-use intensification. We conclude that intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity, making soil food webs less diverse and composed of smaller bodied organisms. Land-use intensification results in fewer functional groups of soil biota with fewer and taxonomically more closely related species. We discuss how these changes in soil biodiversity due to land-use intensification may threaten the functioning of soil in agricultural production systems.read more
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The significance of soils and soil science towards realization of the United Nations sustainable development goals
Saskia Keesstra,Johan Bouma,Jakob Wallinga,Pablo Tittonell,Pete Smith,Artemi Cerdà,Luca Montanarella,John Quinton,Yakov Pachepsky,Wim H. van der Putten,Richard D. Bardgett,Simon Moolenaar,G. Mol,Boris Jansen,Louise O. Fresco +14 more
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