Data from: Crop fields complement biodiversity in permanent grasslands across European landscapes

Biodiversity in temperate agricultural landscapes is in unprecedented decline. The simplification of agricultural landscapes is commonly assumed to be the major driver behind biodiversity declines via the loss of semi-natural non-crop refuge habitats for biodiversity. The relative contribution and importance of non-crop and crop habitats for biodiversity is, however, poorly known and has so far, surprisingly, not been assessed.

Using a unique design comprised of 86 paired semi-natural permanent grasslands and conventionally managed oilseed rape fields selected along a landscape-scale gradient of permanent grassland amount within five European countries (Bulgaria, Germany, Romania, Sweden and Switzerland), we assessed the contribution of both habitat types to the diversity and composition of plants, wild bees, butterflies and carabid beetles. In addition, we assessed whether increasing landscape-level permanent grassland amount increases community similarity between the paired habitats. We show that both crop fields and permanent grasslands contribute in a complimentary way to biodiversity in agricultural landscapes while landscape-level permanent grassland amount did not increase biodiversity and rarely affected community similarity. We document a surprisingly high contribution of crop habitats to biodiversity in agricultural landscapes across Europe. Conserving semi-natural non-crop habitats is thus essential but also insufficient to safeguard biodiversity. Rather, an integrated approach combining the conservation of semi-natural non-crop habitats with biodiversity-friendly crop management is needed to halt biodiversity declines.      

The datasets uploaded here are (a) an R markdown file of our data anlysis pipeline ('Staccato_script.Rmd') and (b) a ZIP archive containing all the single datasets used in the analyses accompanied by a readme file explaining all columns contained in these ('Staccato_data.zip'). 

All data was gathered within the project “SusTaining AgriCultural ChAnge Through ecological engineering and Optimal use of natural resources (STACCATO)” (www.staccato-project.net). Funding for the project was provided by the 2013–2014 BiodivERsA/FACCE-JPI joint call for research proposals (BiodivERsA-FACCE2014-47), with the national funders ‘the National Science Fund’ (Bulgaria: Н15-ВПЕН-020), the ‘Federal Ministry of Education and Research’ (Germany: 01 LC 1402A), the ‘Executive Unit for the Financing of Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (UEFISCDI)’ (Romania: 47/2016), ‘FORMAS’ (Sweden: 226-2014-1786), and the ‘Swiss National Science Foundation’ (Switzerland: 40FA40_158395).