Crop heterogeneity and non-crop vegetation can enhance avian diversity in a tropical agricultural landscape in southern China

Small Things Matter: The Value of Rapid Biodiversity Surveys to Understanding Local Bird Diversity Patterns in Southcentral Mindanao, Philippines

“…During rice-growing cycles, carnivorous birds are abundant during the sowing stage, and granivorous during the postharvest flooded fields (Acosta et al, 2010), and insectivores during the flooding stage (Elphick, 2000(Elphick, , 2004. Moreover, the condition of the ricefields is not the sole factor that influences bird species richness, but also the improved surrounding vegetation quality enhances species diversity and composition (Horgan et al, 2017;Lee & Goodale, 2018;Smedley, 2017). Among all habitat types, roads and urban areas showed the lowest species diversity and endemism in Southcentral Mindanao.…”

Designing Diversified Cropping Systems in China: Theory, Approaches and Implementation

“…Crop diversification is the agricultural practice of concurrently growing a range of crop species in a farm system though intercropping, crop rotations and cover crops, as well as increasing plant diversity in noncrop habitats such as tree lines, grasslands [16,17] and flower strips [18] . Crop diversification is considered to be one of the important components of ecological intensification of agriculture, relying on ecological principles such as positive interactions between species to increase crop yields and reduce dependence on mineral fertilizers and synthetic pesticides.…”

Socioeconomic Determinants of Crop Diversity and Its Effect on Farmer Income in Guangxi, Southern China

“…We distributed the survey to farmers who lived within 20 km of the boundary of Nanning, the capital city of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, in an area where we previously sampled biodiversity [45,46]. The climate is subtropical, with an annual precipitation of 1200 to 1700 mm per year, and midday temperatures that range from 12.8 to 28.2 • C. Fruit orchards and eucalyptus are major industries, but we worked in areas where these were not common, and instead, the dominant crops were rice (planted in two seasons) and sugarcane, with small farms also often including a variety of vegetables.…”

“…This project was set-up to match the location of our previous biodiversity surveys, also located in the surroundings of the city of Nanning [45]. In those surveys, we excluded areas of tree-based agriculture (i.e., eucalyptus, citric orchards), for the reason that the tree structure might influence the presence of biodiversity.…”

“…Guangxi is also part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, and so conservation is also a priority [44]. Our earlier work in this region has shown that increased crop heterogeneity leads to greater species diversity of birds (in one of two seasons studied, Lee and Goodale [45]), higher richness of native and animal-dispersed plants [46] and higher diversity of beneficial insects, including predators and pollinators (Tharaka S. Priyadarshana et al, unpublished manuscript). Yet we need to also know more about the human side of the equation: what affects farmers' decision to plant multiple crops and how it affects them.…”