Does Organic Management Lead To Higher Landscape Heterogeneity In Large Scale Field Crop Production?

Summary

Organic agriculture is expected to maintain or enhance biodiversity in the landscape. Over the past few decades, studies have confirmed that organic management can provide a higher level of biodiversity than conventional management. Landscape heterogeneity, i.e. the diversity of features on a landscape, is positively associated with biodiversity. Large scale field crop production increasingly utilizes large equipment to capture efficiencies of scale. Farmers are known to remove landscape features such as wetlands, woodland patches, and fence lines that interfere with field operations. Here we hypothesize that land under organic field crop management has higher landscape heterogeneity than that under conventional management. To study this, we will identify 120 paired, organic and conventional fields in Saskatchewan, Canada, where landscape heterogeneity will be assessed. For each field, a manual digitization of major landscape structures is carried out and landscape ecological metrics are applied to characterized landscape heterogeneity. Results will help us identify the relationship between landscape heterogeneity and farming systems and specific landscape structures that contribute to the greatest differences between the management systems. These results will help farmers and policymakers better understand the importance of landscape heterogeneity on agricultural systems.