Farmlands with smaller crop fields have higher within-field biodiversity

摘要: Abstract Simple rules for landscape management seem elusive because different species and groups are associated with land cover types; a change in structure that increases diversity of one group may reduce another. On the other hand, if simple landscape–biodiversity relationships do exist despite this complexity, they would have great practical benefit to conservation management. With these considerations mind, we tested consistent between heterogeneity biodiversity farmland (the cropped areas agricultural landscapes), view developing could increase within farmland. Our measures were crop mean field size, where and/or decreases size represent increasing heterogeneity. We sampled abundance, alpha, gamma beta birds, plants, butterflies, syrphids, bees, carabids spiders, fields each 93 1 km × 1 km landscapes. The landscapes selected three gradients composition heterogeneity: proportion crop, Shannon type found had strongest overall effect on fields, was consistently negative. Based our results suggest that, is priority, policies guidelines aimed at reducing sizes should be considered.