Data and codes from: Taxon-specific responses to landscape-scale and long-term implementation of environmentally friendly rice farming

Rice feeds about half of the world's population. The intensification
of rice farming has threatened biodiversity and ecosystem services, such
as pest control. A growing body of evidence suggests that environmentally
friendly rice farming (EFF) can be effective in biodiversity conservation.
However, its dependence on spatial and temporal scales of EFF
implementation and surrounding seminatural habitats has remained largely
unknown. We evaluated the effects of three types of EFF (organic farming,
winter flooding and Integrated Pest Management [IPM]) against conventional
farming on plants, spiders, and waterbirds in Japan. Through systematic
surveys of 254 rice fields across rice production areas, we monitored EFF
implementation at field and landscape scales, considering the time since
transition to EFF and the surrounding seminatural areas. EFF
implementation at the field scale, such as organic farming, was found to
have positive effects on plant richness and spider abundance, whereas the
percent area of EFF fields within a 200-m radius positively affected
Ardeidae abundance. However, as the percent area of surrounding
semi-natural habitats increased, the difference in the plant richness
between organic and other fields decreased. Prolonged implementation
periods of IPM or winter flooding, together with a reduction of more than
50% in synthetic fertilisers and pesticides from conventional agriculture,
led to an increase in the spider abundance. Conversely, no clear positive
effect of longer implementation periods of organic farming resulted in
similar spider abundance in the three EFF types after 20 years. Synthesis
and applications. This suggests that the benefits of environmentally
friendly rice farming depend on their spatial and temporal scales and the
surrounding seminatural areas. We propose that such a context dependency
should be considered in future policy. Our findings also provide a
starting point for future research to test the mixed biodiversity benefits
of EFF across cropland types and around the world.