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Does Increasing Crop Diversity in Time and Space Lead to Improved Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes? : A systematic review protocol

Tanja I. Näslund,H. G. Smith,Peter Olsson,U. Sahlin,C. Rodriguez,Johanna Yourstone,C. Nicholson,Willam Sidemo Holm

Published 2025 in Formas reports

ABSTRACT

Systematic compilation of scientific evidence to inform decision-making is a way to improve both effectiveness and efficiency of decision support. Systematic reviews have come to be considered the gold standard for such evidence compilations (Pullin and Stewart 2006). However, a less appreciated issue is how the fragmented character of evidence in the environmental area affects the accessibility of systematic review methods (e.g., using the Cochran approach template) as a way to synthesize evidence for decision support (Ekroos et al. 2017, Sutherland and Wordley 2018). In environmental research there may be a multitude of outcomes, environmental contexts, scale of effects and more, making it difficult to summarize evidence into simple effect size measures (Sutherland and Wordley 2018). To overcome this, one way is to generalize outcomes or interventions under common groupings to compartmentalize heterogeneity, potentially identifying modifiers if data allows (Gurevitch et al. 2018). Another way is to use expert knowledge to interpolate between heterogeneous evidence (Dicks et al. 2014). These approaches come with their own difficulties, including lack of relevance to decision makers and risk of bias when using expert judgement. Here we focus on the consequences of agricultural management on biodiversity. The number of meta-analysis/systematic reviews focussing on these issues have increased considerably in recent years. However, we contend that the breadth of scope when it comes to outcomes, interventions and environmental context often limits the usability of these evidence compilations. Additionally, previous efforts have aggregated results across disparate management interventions creating synthetic evidence, yet for non-actionable approaches from stakeholders’ point of view. If these differences are not addressed and stakeholder needs not accounted for, the compiled evidence risks misinforming management and policy. However, fully accounting for the differences may instead result in evidence being too sparse to be useable in a specific decision context. A key aim in this project is if and how evidence synthesis can be performed to compile existing evidence in a quantitative way, yet usable to real world decision-making. Our concrete example will be the effect of crop diversity in space and time on biodiversity. We base our selection of a concrete example on the recent interest of the Swedish Board of Agriculture on small-scale interventions to benefit biodiversity and by broader EU interest in crop diversity, which was targeted by the “Greening of the CAP” (Hauck et al. 2014).

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