Data from: The roles of non-production vegetation in agroecosystems: a research framework for filling process knowledge gaps in a social-ecological context

1. We searched the international literature for relevant articles following a modified systematic review protocol (Pickering & Byrne 2014). Relevant articles were defined as those that described primary research conducted on farmland that addressed questions regarding any ecological function(s) associated with non-production vegetation. 2. Five distinct search strings, comprised of various keywords (Table S1) were designed to find relevant papers addressing the following broad topics related to non-production vegetation in agroecosystems; faunal diversity and use of vegetation; spatial arrangement of vegetation in the landscape; pests and disease in vegetation; weeds in vegetation; abiotic functional responses to vegetation. 3. The proportion of relevant articles returned by 30 scholarly databases was examined using all five search strings, and nine databases were selected based on the proportion of these relevant returns: BASE, BioOne, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Jurn, ProQuest, Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science. 4. Each search string was entered into each of the nine databases in turn, and all relevant articles were downloaded (where relevance was determined by reading the abstract). If no relevant articles were found for the first 100 returns, we moved on to the next search string. 5. For every relevant article found, we also checked all citing articles using the “Cited by” function in Google Scholar. After the initial two databases were searched, we extracted all keywords from papers and ranked them by the number of occurrences. We updated the search strings to include any commonly-used keywords that were missing from the strings. The faunal and spatial searches that were carried out first yielded significant overlap relative to our article selection criteria, and were ultimately combined into one faunal database. 6. Once all searches were complete, we extracted and cross-referenced all reference lists from the downloaded articles using ParsCit (Kan et al. 2011) to compile a final list of articles across all searches. 7. A total of 704 articles were read and 342 were included using the criteria that they were: (1) empirical (not modelling or meta-analysis) studies within agroecosystems; and (2) they at least discussed the effects of non-production vegetation on processes, not just biodiversity, within agroecosystems.