Community reorganization stabilizes freshwater ecosystems in intensively managed agricultural fields

Abstract

1. Sustainable intensification may depend on associating precision farming with the harnessing of ecological principles in crop fields, and integrating farms and nonfarmed land in productive landscapes. Small wetlands could play an important role in both pursuits for having high per-unit-area rates of element cycling and species richness while deeply penetrating crop fields. However, their potential for ecosystem service provisioning is unlikely to be met if land management intensification promotes ecosystem destabilization in biomass production.2. We tested the consequences of land use intensification on various dimensions of freshwater ecosystem stability by means of a large-scale field experiment converting extensive pastures to intensive pastures and sugarcane plantations in Southeastern Brazil. Nested within experimental plots were 4000 L mesocosms simulating ponds and puddles commonly found in productive landscapes.Mesocosms were monitored for basic physico-chemical parameters, nutrients, pesticides, phytoplankton standing crop, and the spontaneously colonizing biodiversity.3. Despite severe environmental change, the stability of sugarcane communities was no different from that of extensive and intensive pastures. This occurred because the local extinction of a sensitive top dragonfly predator following the application of vinasse and insecticide was compensated by colonization of a suite of more tolerant invertebrate mesopredators such as beetles and bugs. Community stability tended to increase with biomass asynchrony and species richness, evidencing a portfolio effect of biodiversity. Unfortunately, the species richness necessary to

Water Protection Zones—Impacts on Weed Vegetation of Arable Soil

“…They are also an essential part of terrestrial food webs and play an important role in ecosystem services for many terrestrial animals, including vertebrates [70][71][72][73][74]. A loss of biodiversity destabilizes farmland ecosystems, which potentially threatens the sustainable intensification of agriculture [75].…”

“…The need to feed billions of people necessitate reliable and predictable crop yields, with a parallel requirement to preserve conditions for biodiversity. This can be achieved using a model of agricultural production that includes water bodies and respects the multi-function use of productive landscapes [75].…”