The article “Positive but variable effects of crop diversification on biodiversity and ecosystem services”, published in Global Change Biology on 18 July 2021, assembles for the first time a substantial body of empirical evidence on the positive impacts of cultivated biodiversity on agroecosystems. The first author Damien Beillouin, a CIRAD agronomic data analysis specialist, stresses the scope: “Most studies to date have been scattered. Here we synthesised the quantified impacts of over 5,000 field studies from across the globe, from 1936 to now.”
The article is a large-scale synthesis review conducted by a Franco-Dutch research team, including a compilation of the results of 95 meta-analyses, 5,156 studies and 54,554 experiments spanning 85 years and representing more than 120 crop species in 85 countries. Crop diversification was found to enhance crop production by 14% and associated biodiversity by almost 25%. Water quality was improved by 50%, pest and disease control by over 63% and soil quality by 11%. The authors—scientists from CIRAD, INRAE and VU University Amsterdam—distinguished between the diversification strategies implemented, while highlighting the excellent performance of agroforestry-based systems.