Abstract: Using conventional agricultural practices, such as monocultures and chemicalization, can cause landscape simplification and biodiversity loss. These have negative consequences on ecosystem services, which include biological pest control and pollination. Ecosystem services are influenced by local practices, surrounding landscapes, and their interactions. Studies have shown local diversification practices, like floral strips and organic farming can enhance ecosystem services. Landscape complexity surrounding the farm is also important, especially the amount of natural and semi-natural habitat. The intermediate landscape complexity hypothesis states that local diversification practices are most effective at enhancing ecosystem services in intermediate landscapes. These landscapes have an intermediate amount of non-crop habitat area and are neither fully agricultural nor natural. However, studies have produced inconsistent results, with some local practices being most effective in intermediate landscapes, others in complex landscapes, and others still showing no differences. This raises the question of whether or not local diversification practices are too landscape-dependent to be prescribed as generalized solutions.
The objective of this review is to synthesize existing studies on the impacts of local and landscape diversification on ecosystem services. We conducted a Web of Science search followed by a title and abstract analysis to select papers that looked at local diversification, landscape gradient, their interactions, and their effects on arthropod biodiversity and ecosystem services. We recorded whether local practices, landscape gradients, and their interaction had a positive, negative, or non-significant effect on arthropod biodiversity and ecosystem services. Our results showed that the most common response is local and landscape factors and their interaction have non-significant effects on biodiversity and ecosystem services. For both the local and landscape scales, diversification has positive effects more often than negative ones, implying that local diversification and increasing landscape complexity are generally advantageous. The effectiveness of local diversification is often dependent on the landscape. This review demonstrates the importance of local diversification and landscape complexity for enhancing ecosystem services and improving agricultural sustainability. By implementing practices and designing landscapes that support arthropods and their ability to provide ecosystem services, agroecosystems can improve pollination and biological pest control, resulting in benefits such as reduced pesticide use and greater biodiversity.
