Prairie strips improve biodiversity and the delivery of multiple ecosystem services from corn–soybean croplands

Abstract

Loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services from agricultural lands remain important challenges in the United States despite decades of spending on natural resource management. To date, conservation investment has emphasized engineering practices or vegetative strategies centered on monocultural plantings of nonnative plants, largely excluding native species from cropland. In a catchment-scale experiment, we quantified the multiple effects of integrating strips of native prairie species amid corn and soybean crops, with prairie strips arranged to arrest run-off on slopes. Replacing 10% of cropland with prairie strips increased biodiversity and ecosystem services with minimal impacts on crop production. Compared with catchments containing only crops, integrating prairie strips into cropland led to greater catchment-level insect taxa richness (2.6-fold), pollinator abundance (3.5-fold), native bird species richness (2.1-fold), and abundance of bird species of greatest conservation need (2.1-fold). Use of prairie strips also reduced total water runoff from catchments by 37%, resulting in retention of 20 times more soil and 4.3 times more phosphorus. Corn and soybean yields for catchments with prairie strips decreased only by the amount of the area taken out of crop production. Social survey results indicated demand among both farming and nonfarming populations for the environmental outcomes produced by prairie strips. If federal and state policies were aligned to promote prairie strips, the practice would be applicable to 3.9 million ha of cropland in Iowa alone.

Mismatched outcomes for biodiversity and ecosystem services: testing the responses of crop pollinators and wild bee biodiversity to habitat enhancement

“…a, upper right panel). We observed greater abundance, richness and diversity of wild bees collected on enhanced edges than unenhanced edges, adding support to a growing body of evidence that small, field‐scale habitat restoration can support farmland biodiversity (Carvell et al ; Williams et al ; Schulte et al ). However, when comparing control and enhanced crops, we observed no difference in these same measures.…”

Antagonistic, synergistic and direct effects of land use and climate on Prairie wetland ecosystems: Ghosts of the past or present?

“…TP concentrations tended to increase with surrounding cropland, but multiple ponds had high (>3 mg/L) TP and no cropland within 100 m of wetland survey points, suggesting that macroinvertebrates may respond to anthropogenic and livestock inputs and impacts that occur at larger scales. Riparian buffer strips can greatly improve the quality of agricultural wetlands by reducing nutrient loading, erosion and other contaminants entering the water due to surface run‐off (Schulte et al, ; Vought, Pinay, Fuglsang, & Ruffinoni, ). Our finding of an antagonistic relationship between non‐woody vegetation and salinity on macroinvertebrate taxa richness is important, and consistent with the theory that riparian cover and less intense land use surrounding wetland basins can ameliorate impacts of water quality and potentially future climate change on aquatic macroinvertebrate communities (Mantyka‐Pringle, Martin, Moffatt, Linke, & Rhodes, ).…”

“…TP concentrations tended to increase with surrounding cropland, but multiple ponds had high (>3 mg/L) TP and no cropland within 100 m of wetland survey points, suggesting that macroinvertebrates may respond to anthropogenic and livestock inputs and impacts that occur at larger scales. Riparian buffer strips can greatly improve the quality of agricultural wetlands by reducing nutrient loading, erosion and other contaminants entering the water due to surface run-off (Schulte et al, 2017;Vought, Pinay, Fuglsang, & Ruffinoni, 1995 2014). Protecting and/or restoring riparian zones could also prevent shifts in higher trophic levels from specialized to generalized insectivores due to changes in relative abundances of primary producers (Blann, Anderson, Sands, & Vondracek, 2009).…”

Where can switchgrass production be more profitable than corn and soybean? An integrated subfield assessment in Iowa, USA

“…The enterprise budgets we assume for corn/soybean and switchgrass were not adjusted to reflect potential higher costs associated with small or fragmented fields, for several reasons: (1) our identified target fields vary widely in terms of size, shape, and fragmentation, therefore, a standardized adjustment to the budget, as assumed by Soldavini & Tyner (2018), would not improve the model, (2) we are not accounting for increased costs in corn/soybean fields of small sizes or odd shapes that are currently farmed, and (3) we are not similarly accounting for potential positive economic effects. For example, integrating perennials into corn/ soybean fields could have a positive effect when placed strategically, by re-shaping odd cropland shapes into tidy rectangles that can be farmed more efficiently (Tyndall et al, 2013;Schulte et al, 2017).…”