Biodiversity and pollination benefits trade off against profit in an intensive farming system

Agricultural expansion and intensification have boosted global food production but have come at the cost of environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Biodiversity-friendly farming that boosts ecosystem services, such as pollination and natural pest control, is widely being advocated to maintain and improve agricultural productivity while safeguarding biodiversity. A vast body of evidence showing the agronomic benefits of enhanced ecosystem service delivery represents important incentives to adopt practices enhancing biodiversity. However, the costs of biodiversity-friendly management are rarely taken into account and may represent a major barrier impeding uptake by farmers. Whether and how biodiversity conservation, ecosystem service delivery, and farm profit can go hand in hand is unknown. Here we quantify the ecological, agronomic and net economic benefits of biodiversity-friendly farming in an intensive grassland-sunflower system in southwest France. We found that reducing lan..., Species richness and abundance data on bees were collected in 2015 in 21 pairs of grasslands and adjacent sunflower fields in southwestern France. In each grassland and sunflower field, bees were surveyed in two 150 m2 transects, with a total of 15 min net surveying time per transect. Sunflower fields were sampled in two survey rounds during sunflower bloom; grasslands were sampled twice just before and twice shortly after sunflower bloom.  All entomophilous plant species that flowered during the grassland surveys were recorded and their flower cover was estimated as the total number of flower units × the mean surface area of the flower unit, divided by the transect area. Total flower cover per transect was determined as the sum of the cover of all observed flowering species.
The contribution of insect pollination to sunflower crop yield was assessed using pollinator exclusion treatments. Prior to anthesis, ten pairs of sunflower plants were selected in each field, with the pairs evenly...,