Rainforest transformation reallocates energy from green to brown food webs.

Terrestrial animal biodiversity is increasingly being lost because of land-use change1,2. However, functional and energetic consequences aboveground and belowground and across trophic levels in megadiverse tropical ecosystems remain largely unknown. To fill this gap, we assessed changes in energy fluxes across 'green' aboveground (canopy arthropods and birds) and 'brown' belowground (soil arthropods and earthworms) animal food webs in tropical rainforests and plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia. Our results showed that most of the energy in rainforests is channelled to the belowground animal food web. Oil palm and rubber plantations had similar or, in the case of rubber agroforest, higher total animal energy fluxes compared to rainforest but the key energetic nodes were distinctly different: in rainforest more than 90% of the total animal energy flux was channelled by arthropods in soil and canopy, whereas in plantations more than 50% of the energy was allocated to annelids (earthworms). Land-use change led to a consistent decline in multitrophic energy flux aboveground, whereas belowground food webs responded with reduced energy flux to higher trophic levels, down to -90%, and with shifts from slow (fungal) to fast (bacterial) energy channels and from faeces production towards consumption of soil organic matter. This coincides with previously reported soil carbon stock depletion3. Here we show that well-documented animal biodiversity declines with tropical land-use change4-6 are associated with vast energetic and functional restructuring in food webs across aboveground and belowground ecosystem compartments.

Tree islands enhance biodiversity and functioning in oil palm landscapes.

In the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration1, large knowledge gaps persist on how to increase biodiversity and ecosystem functioning in cash crop-dominated tropical landscapes2. Here, we present findings from a large-scale, 5-year ecosystem restoration experiment in an oil palm landscape enriched with 52 tree islands, encompassing assessments of ten indicators of biodiversity and 19 indicators of ecosystem functioning. Overall, indicators of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, as well as multidiversity and ecosystem multifunctionality, were higher in tree islands compared to conventionally managed oil palm. Larger tree islands led to larger gains in multidiversity through changes in vegetation structure. Furthermore, tree enrichment did not decrease landscape-scale oil palm yield. Our results demonstrate that enriching oil palm-dominated landscapes with tree islands is a promising ecological restoration strategy, yet should not replace the protection of remaining forests.

Balancing economic and ecological functions in smallholder and industrial oil palm plantations.

The expansion of the oil palm industry in Indonesia has improved livelihoods in rural communities, but comes at the cost of biodiversity and ecosystem degradation. Here, we investigated ways to balance ecological and economic outcomes of oil palm cultivation. We compared a wide range of production systems, including smallholder plantations, industrialized company estates, estates with improved agronomic management, and estates with native tree enrichment. Across all management types, we assessed multiple indicators of biodiversity, ecosystem functions, management, and landscape structure to identify factors that facilitate economic-ecological win-wins, using palm yields as measure of economic performance. Although, we found that yields in industrialized estates were, on average, twice as high as those in smallholder plantations, ecological indicators displayed substantial variability across systems, regardless of yield variations, highlighting potential for economic-ecological win-wins. Reducing management intensity (e.g., mechanical weeding instead of herbicide application) did not lower yields but improved ecological outcomes at moderate costs, making it a potential measure for balancing economic and ecological demands. Additionally, maintaining forest cover in the landscape generally enhanced local biodiversity and ecosystem functioning within plantations. Enriching plantations with native trees is also a promising strategy to increase ecological value without reducing productivity. Overall, we recommend closing yield gaps in smallholder cultivation through careful intensification, whereas conventional plantations could reduce management intensity without sacrificing yield. Our study highlights various pathways to reconcile the economics and ecology of palm oil production and identifies management practices for a more sustainable future of oil palm cultivation.

Land-use trajectories for sustainable land system transformations: Identifying leverage points in a global biodiversity hotspot.

Sustainable land-system transformations are necessary to avert biodiversity and climate collapse. However, it remains unclear where entry points for transformations exist in complex land systems. Here, we conceptualize land systems along land-use trajectories, which allows us to identify and evaluate leverage points, i.e., entry points on the trajectory where targeted interventions have particular leverage to influence land-use decisions. We apply this framework in the biodiversity hotspot Madagascar. In the northeast, smallholder agriculture results in a land-use trajectory originating in old-growth forests and spanning from forest fragments to shifting hill rice cultivation and vanilla agroforests. Integrating interdisciplinary empirical data on seven taxa, five ecosystem services, and three measures of agricultural productivity, we assess trade-offs and cobenefits of land-use decisions at three leverage points along the trajectory. These trade-offs and cobenefits differ between leverage points: Two leverage points are situated at the conversion of old-growth forests and forest fragments to shifting cultivation and agroforestry, resulting in considerable trade-offs, especially between endemic biodiversity and agricultural productivity. Here, interventions enabling smallholders to conserve forests are necessary. This is urgent since ongoing forest loss threatens to eliminate these leverage points due to path dependency. The third leverage point allows for the restoration of land under shifting cultivation through vanilla agroforests and offers cobenefits between restoration goals and agricultural productivity. The co-occurring leverage points highlight that conservation and restoration are simultaneously necessary to avert collapse of multifunctional mosaic landscapes. Methodologically, the framework highlights the importance of considering path dependency along trajectories to achieve sustainable land-system transformations.

Crop and landscape heterogeneity increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: A global review and meta-analysis.

Agricultural intensification not only increases food production but also drives widespread biodiversity decline. Increasing landscape heterogeneity has been suggested to increase biodiversity across habitats, while increasing crop heterogeneity may support biodiversity within agroecosystems. These spatial heterogeneity effects can be partitioned into compositional (land-cover type diversity) and configurational heterogeneity (land-cover type arrangement), measured either for the crop mosaic or across the landscape for both crops and semi-natural habitats. However, studies have reported mixed responses of biodiversity to increases in these heterogeneity components across taxa and contexts. Our meta-analysis covering 6397 fields across 122 studies conducted in Asia, Europe, North and South America reveals consistently positive effects of crop and landscape heterogeneity, as well as compositional and configurational heterogeneity for plant, invertebrate, vertebrate, pollinator and predator biodiversity. Vertebrates and plants benefit more from landscape heterogeneity, while invertebrates derive similar benefits from both crop and landscape heterogeneity. Pollinators benefit more from configurational heterogeneity, but predators favour compositional heterogeneity. These positive effects are consistent for invertebrates and vertebrates in both tropical/subtropical and temperate agroecosystems, and in annual and perennial cropping systems, and at small to large spatial scales. Our results suggest that promoting increased landscape heterogeneity by diversifying crops and semi-natural habitats, as suggested in the current UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, is key for restoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes.

Flower-bee versus pollen-bee metanetworks in fragmented landscapes.

Understanding the organization of mutualistic networks at multiple spatial scales is key to ensure biological conservation and functionality in human-modified ecosystems. Yet, how changing habitat and landscape features affect pollen-bee interaction networks is still poorly understood. Here, we analysed how bee-flower visitation and bee-pollen-transport interactions respond to habitat fragmentation at the local network and regional metanetwork scales, combining data from 29 fragments of calcareous grasslands, an endangered biodiversity hotspot in central Europe. We found that only 37% of the total unique pairwise species interactions occurred in both pollen-transport and flower visitation networks, whereas 28% and 35% were exclusive to pollen-transport and flower visitation networks, respectively. At local level, network specialization was higher in pollen-transport networks, and was negatively related to the diversity of land cover types in both network types. At metanetwork level, pollen transport data revealed that the proportion of single-fragment interactions increased with landscape diversity. Our results show that the specialization of calcareous grasslands' plant-pollinator networks decreases with landscape diversity, but network specialization is underestimated when only based on flower visitation information. Pollen transport data, more than flower visitation, and multi-scale analyses of metanetworks are fundamental for understanding plant-pollinator interactions in human-dominated landscapes.

Distance functions of carabids in crop fields depend on functional traits, crop type and adjacent habitat: a synthesis.

Natural pest and weed regulation are essential for agricultural production, but the spatial distribution of natural enemies within crop fields and its drivers are mostly unknown. Using 28 datasets comprising 1204 study sites across eight Western and Central European countries, we performed a quantitative synthesis of carabid richness, activity densities and functional traits in relation to field edges (i.e. distance functions). We show that distance functions of carabids strongly depend on carabid functional traits, crop type and, to a lesser extent, adjacent non-crop habitats. Richness of both carnivores and granivores, and activity densities of small and granivorous species decreased towards field interiors, whereas the densities of large species increased. We found strong distance decays in maize and vegetables whereas richness and densities remained more stable in cereals, oilseed crops and legumes. We conclude that carabid assemblages in agricultural landscapes are driven by the complex interplay of crop types, adjacent non-crop habitats and further landscape parameters with great potential for targeted agroecological management. In particular, our synthesis indicates that a higher edge-interior ratio can counter the distance decay of carabid richness per field and thus likely benefits natural pest and weed regulation, hence contributing to agricultural sustainability.

Urbanization alters the spatiotemporal dynamics of plant-pollinator networks in a tropical megacity.

Urbanization is a major driver of biodiversity change but how it interacts with spatial and temporal gradients to influence the dynamics of plant-pollinator networks is poorly understood, especially in tropical urbanization hotspots. Here, we analysed the drivers of environmental, spatial and temporal turnover of plant-pollinator interactions (interaction ß-diversity) along an urbanization gradient in Bengaluru, a South Indian megacity. The compositional turnover of plant-pollinator interactions differed more between seasons and with local urbanization intensity than with spatial distance, suggesting that seasonality and environmental filtering were more important than dispersal limitation for explaining plant-pollinator interaction ß-diversity. Furthermore, urbanization amplified the seasonal dynamics of plant-pollinator interactions, with stronger temporal turnover in urban compared to rural sites, driven by greater turnover of native non-crop plant species (not managed by people). Our study demonstrates that environmental, spatial and temporal gradients interact to shape the dynamics of plant-pollinator networks and urbanization can strongly amplify these dynamics.

Birds and bats enhance cacao yield despite suppressing arthropod mesopredation.

Bird- and bat-mediated biocontrol benefits the productivity of tropical commodity crops such as cacao, but the ecological interactions driving these ecosystem services remain poorly understood. Whereas birds and bats prey on herbivorous arthropods, they may also prey on arthropod mesopredators such as ants, with poorly understood consequences for pest biocontrol. We used a full-factorial experiment excluding birds, bats, and ants to assess their effects on (a) the abundance of multiple arthropod groups; (b) predation pressure on arthropods evaluated through artificial sentinel caterpillars; and (c) cacao yield over 1 year in shaded agroforestry systems of native cacao varieties in Peru. Birds and bats increased cacao yield by 118%, which translates in smallholder benefits of ca. US $959 ha-1 year-1 . Birds and bats decreased predation by ants and other arthropods, but contributed to the control of phytophagous taxa such as aphids and mealybugs. By contrast, ant presence increased the abundance of these sap-sucking insects, with negative impacts for cacao yield. Notably, high abundances of the dominant ant Nylanderia sp., known to attend sap-sucking insects, were associated with lower cacao yield along a distance gradient from the closest forest edge. According to these results, arthropod predation by birds and bats, rather than mesopredation by arthropods, was most responsible for increases in cacao yield. Moving forward, detailed research about their trophic interactions will be necessary to identify the cause of such benefits. Retaining and restoring the large benefits of birds and bats as well as minimizing disservices by other taxa in cacao agroforests can benefit from management schemes that prioritize preservation of shade trees and adjacent forests within agroforestry landscapes.

Tree identity and canopy openness mediate oil palm biodiversity enrichment effects on insect herbivory and pollination.

As the extent of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) cultivation has expanded at the expense of tropical rainforests, enriching conventional large-scale oil palm plantations with native trees has been proposed as a strategy for restoring biodiversity and ecosystem function. However, how tree enrichment affects insect-mediated ecosystem functions is unknown. We investigated impacts on insect herbivory and pollination in the fourth year of a plantation-scale, long-term oil palm biodiversity enrichment experiment in Jambi, Sumatra, Indonesia. Within 48 plots systematically varying in size (25-1600 m2 ) and planted tree species richness (one to six species), we collected response data on vegetation structure, understory insect abundances, and pollinator and herbivore activity on chili plants (Capsicum annuum), which served as indicators of insect-mediated ecosystem functions. We examined the independent effects of plot size, tree species richness, and tree identity on these response variables, using the linear model for random partitions design. The experimental treatments were most associated with vegetation structure: tree identity mattered, as the species Peronema canescens strongly decreased (by approximately one standard deviation) both canopy openness and understory vegetation cover; whereas tree richness only decreased understory flower density. Further, the smallest plots had the lowest understory flower density and richness, presumably because of lower light availability and colonization rates, respectively. Enrichment influenced herbivorous insects and natural enemies in the understory to a lesser extent: both groups had higher abundances in plots with two enrichment species planted, possibly because higher associated tree mortality created more habitat, while herbivores decreased with increasing tree species richness, in line with the resource concentration hypothesis. Linking relationships in structural equation models showed that the negative association between P. canescens and understory vegetation cover was mediated through canopy openness. Likewise, canopy openness mediated increases in herbivore and pollinator insect abundances. Higher pollinator visitation increased phytometer yield, while impacts of insect herbivores on yield were not apparent. Our results demonstrate that even at an early stage, different levels of ecological restoration influence insect-mediated ecosystem functions, mainly through canopy openness. These findings suggest that maintaining some canopy gaps while enrichment plots develop may be beneficial for increasing habitat heterogeneity and insect-mediated ecosystem functions.

Seed treatment with clothianidin induces changes in plant metabolism and alters pollinator foraging preferences.

Neonicotinoids, systemic insecticides that are distributed into all plant tissues and protect against pests, have become a common part of crop production, but can unintentionally also affect non-target organisms, including pollinators. Such effects can be direct effects from insecticide exposure, but neonicotinoids can affect plant physiology, and effects could therefore also be indirectly mediated by changes in plant phenology, attractiveness and nutritional value. Under controlled greenhouse conditions, we tested if seed treatment with the neonicotinoid clothianidin affected oilseed rape's production of flower resources for bees and the content of the secondary plant products glucosinolates that provide defense against herbivores. Additionally, we tested if seed treatment affected the attractiveness of oilseed rape to flower visiting bumblebees, using outdoor mesocosms. Flowers and leaves of clothianidin-treated plants had different profiles of glucosinolates compared with untreated plants. Bumblebees in mesocosms foraged slightly more on untreated plants. Neither flower timing, flower size nor the production of pollen and nectar differed between treatments, and therefore cannot explain any preference for untreated oilseed rape. We instead propose that this small but significant preference for untreated plants was related to the altered glucosinolate profile caused by clothianidin. Thereby, this study contributes to the understanding of the complex relationships between neonicotinoid-treated crops and pollinator foraging choices, by suggesting a potential mechanistic link by which insecticide treatment can affect insect behavior.

Biodiversity and yield trade-offs for organic farming.

Organic farming supports higher biodiversity than conventional farming, but at the cost of lower yields. We conducted a meta-analysis quantifying the trade-off between biodiversity and yield, comparing conventional and organic farming. We developed a compatibility index to assess whether biodiversity gains from organic farming exceed yield losses, and a substitution index to assess whether organic farming would increase biodiversity in an area if maintaining total production under organic farming would require cultivating more land at the expense of nature. Overall, organic farming had 23% gain in biodiversity with a similar cost of yield decline. Biodiversity gain is negatively correlated to yield loss for microbes and plants, but no correlation was found for other taxa. The biodiversity and yield trade-off varies under different contexts of organic farming. The overall compatibility index value was close to zero, with negative values for cereal crops, positive for non-cereal crops, and varies across taxa. Our results indicate that, on average, the proportion of biodiversity gain is similar to the proportion of yield loss for paired field studies. For some taxa in non-cereal crops, switching to organic farming can lead to a biodiversity gain without yield loss. We calculated the overall value of substitution index and further discussed the application of this index to evaluate when the biodiversity of less intensified farming system is advantageous.

Quantifying services and disservices provided by insects and vertebrates in cacao agroforestry landscapes.

Animals provide services such as pollination and pest control in cacao agroforestry systems, but also disservices. Yet, their combined contributions to crop yield and fruit loss are mostly unclear. In a full-factorial field experiment in northwestern Peru, we excluded flying insects, ants, birds and bats from cacao trees and assessed several productivity indicators. We quantified the contribution of each group to fruit set, fruit loss and marketable yield and evaluated how forest distance and canopy closure affected productivity. Fruit set dropped (from 1.7% to 0.3%) when flying insects were excluded and tripled at intermediate (40%) compared to high (greater than 80%) canopy cover in the non-exclusion treatment. Fruit set also dropped with bird and bat exclusion, potentially due to increased abundances of arthropods preying on pollinators or flower herbivores. Overall, cacao yields more than doubled when birds and bats had access to trees. Ants were generally associated with fruit loss, but also with yield increases in agroforests close to forest. We also evidenced disservices generated by squirrels, leading to significant fruit losses. Our findings show that several functional groups contribute to high cacao yield, while trade-offs between services and disservices need to be integrated in local and landscape-scale sustainable cacao agroforestry management.

Functional diversity of farmland bees across rural-urban landscapes in a tropical megacity.

Urbanization poses a major threat to biodiversity and food security, as expanding cities, especially in the Global South, increasingly compete with natural and agricultural lands. However, the impact of urban expansion on agricultural biodiversity in tropical regions is overlooked. Here we assess how urbanization affects the functional response of farmland bees, the most important pollinators for crop production. We sampled bees across three seasons in 36 conventional vegetable-producing farms spread along an urbanization gradient in Bengaluru, an Indian megacity. We investigated how landscape and local environmental drivers affected different functional traits (sociality, nesting behavior, body size, and specialization) and functional diversity (functional dispersion) of bee communities. We found that the functional responses to urbanization were trait specific with more positive than negative effects of gray area (sealed surfaces and buildings) on species richness, functional diversity, and abundance of most functional groups. As expected, larger, solitary, cavity-nesting, and, surprisingly, specialist bees benefited from urbanization. In contrast to temperate cities, the abundance of ground nesters increased in urban areas, presumably because larger patches of bare soil were still available beside roads and buildings. However, overall bee abundance and the abundance of social bees (85% of all bees) decreased with urbanization, threatening crop pollination. Crop diversity promotes taxonomic and functional diversity of bee communities. Locally, flower resources promote the abundance of all functional groups, and natural vegetation can maintain diverse pollinator communities throughout the year, especially during the noncropping season. However, exotic plants decrease functional diversity and bee specialization. To safeguard bees and their pollination services in urban farms, we recommend (1) preserving seminatural vegetation (hedges) around cropping fields to provide nesting opportunities for aboveground nesters, (2) promoting farm-level crop diversification of beneficial crops (e.g., pulses, vegetables, and spices), (3) maintaining native natural vegetation along field margins, and (4) controlling and removing invasive exotic plants that disrupt native plant-pollinator interactions. Overall, our results suggest that urban agriculture can maintain functionally diverse bee communities and, if managed in a sustainable manner, be used to develop win-win solutions for biodiversity conservation of pollinators and food security in and around cities.

Land-use intensification causes multitrophic homogenization of grassland communities.

Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. Alongside reductions in local species diversity, biotic homogenization at larger spatial scales is of great concern for conservation. Biotic homogenization means a decrease in ß-diversity (the compositional dissimilarity between sites). Most studies have investigated losses in local (α)-diversity and neglected biodiversity loss at larger spatial scales. Studies addressing ß-diversity have focused on single or a few organism groups (for example, ref. 4), and it is thus unknown whether land-use intensification homogenizes communities at different trophic levels, above- and belowground. Here we show that even moderate increases in local land-use intensity (LUI) cause biotic homogenization across microbial, plant and animal groups, both above- and belowground, and that this is largely independent of changes in α-diversity. We analysed a unique grassland biodiversity dataset, with abundances of more than 4,000 species belonging to 12 trophic groups. LUI, and, in particular, high mowing intensity, had consistent effects on ß-diversity across groups, causing a homogenization of soil microbial, fungal pathogen, plant and arthropod communities. These effects were nonlinear and the strongest declines in ß-diversity occurred in the transition from extensively managed to intermediate intensity grassland. LUI tended to reduce local α-diversity in aboveground groups, whereas the α-diversity increased in belowground groups. Correlations between the ß-diversity of different groups, particularly between plants and their consumers, became weaker at high LUI. This suggests a loss of specialist species and is further evidence for biotic homogenization. The consistently negative effects of LUI on landscape-scale biodiversity underscore the high value of extensively managed grasslands for conserving multitrophic biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Indeed, biotic homogenization rather than local diversity loss could prove to be the most substantial consequence of land-use intensification.

Increasing crop heterogeneity enhances multitrophic diversity across agricultural regions.

Agricultural landscape homogenization has detrimental effects on biodiversity and key ecosystem services. Increasing agricultural landscape heterogeneity by increasing seminatural cover can help to mitigate biodiversity loss. However, the amount of seminatural cover is generally low and difficult to increase in many intensively managed agricultural landscapes. We hypothesized that increasing the heterogeneity of the crop mosaic itself (hereafter "crop heterogeneity") can also have positive effects on biodiversity. In 8 contrasting regions of Europe and North America, we selected 435 landscapes along independent gradients of crop diversity and mean field size. Within each landscape, we selected 3 sampling sites in 1, 2, or 3 crop types. We sampled 7 taxa (plants, bees, butterflies, hoverflies, carabids, spiders, and birds) and calculated a synthetic index of multitrophic diversity at the landscape level. Increasing crop heterogeneity was more beneficial for multitrophic diversity than increasing seminatural cover. For instance, the effect of decreasing mean field size from 5 to 2.8 ha was as strong as the effect of increasing seminatural cover from 0.5 to 11%. Decreasing mean field size benefited multitrophic diversity even in the absence of seminatural vegetation between fields. Increasing the number of crop types sampled had a positive effect on landscape-level multitrophic diversity. However, the effect of increasing crop diversity in the landscape surrounding fields sampled depended on the amount of seminatural cover. Our study provides large-scale, multitrophic, cross-regional evidence that increasing crop heterogeneity can be an effective way to increase biodiversity in agricultural landscapes without taking land out of agricultural production.

Floral resource diversification promotes solitary bee reproduction and may offset insecticide effects - evidence from a semi-field experiment.

Pollinator declines in agricultural landscapes are driven by multiple stressors, but potential interactions of these remain poorly studied. Using a highly replicated semi-field study with 56 mesocosms of varying wild plant diversity (2-16 species) and oilseed rape treated with a neonicotinoid, we tested the interacting effects of resource diversity and insecticides on reproduction of a solitary wild bee. Compared to mesocosms with oilseed rape monocultures, availability of resources from wild plants complementing oilseed rape doubled brood cell production. In addition, bee reproduction increased due to plant diversity and identity effects. Exposure to neonicotinoid-treated oilseed rape reduced bee larval to adult development by 69%, but only in mesocosms with oilseed rape monocultures. Availability of complementary flower resources can thus offset negative effects of neonicotinoid-treated oilseed rape on wild bee reproduction. Policy should encourage the implementation of diverse floral resources mitigating negative effects of crop monocultures and insecticides, thereby sustaining solitary bee populations in agricultural landscapes.

A plant-pollinator metanetwork along a habitat fragmentation gradient.

To understand how plant-pollinator interactions respond to habitat fragmentation, we need novel approaches that can capture properties that emerge at broad scales, where multiple communities engage in metanetworks. Here we studied plant-pollinator interactions over 2 years on 29 calcareous grassland fragments selected along independent gradients of habitat size and surrounding landscape diversity of cover types. We associated network centrality of plant-pollinator interactions and grassland fragments with their ecological and landscape traits, respectively. Interactions involving habitat specialist plants and large-bodied pollinators were the most central, implying that species with these traits form the metanetwork core. Large fragments embedded in landscapes with high land cover diversity exhibited the highest centrality; however, small fragments harboured many unique interactions not found on larger fragments. Intensively managed landscapes have reached a point in which all remaining fragments matter, meaning that losing any further areas may vanish unique interactions with unknown consequences for ecosystem functioning.

Species-habitat networks elucidate landscape effects on habitat specialisation of natural enemies and pollinators.

Measuring habitat specialisation is pivotal for predicting species extinctions and for understanding consequences on ecosystem functioning. Here, we sampled pollinator and natural enemy communities in all major habitat types occurring across multiple agricultural landscapes and used species-habitat networks to determine how habitat specialisation changed along gradients in landscape composition and configuration. Although it is well known that landscape simplification often causes the replacement of specialists with generalists, our study provided evidence for intraspecific variation in habitat specialisation, highlighting how a large number of arthropod species adapted their way of selecting habitat resources depending on the landscape structure. Groups with higher diet specialisation and limited foraging flexibility appeared to have a reduced ability to respond to landscape changes, indicating that some arthropod taxa are better able than others to adapt to an increasingly broad set of resources and persist in highly impacted landscapes.

Preserving 40% forest cover is a valuable and well-supported conservation guideline: reply to Banks-Leite et al.

Banks-Leite et al. (2021) claim that our suggestion of preserving ≥ 40% forest cover lacks evidence and can be problematic. We find these claims unfounded, and discuss why conservation planning urgently requires valuable, well-supported and feasible general guidelines like the 40% criterion. Using region-specific thresholds worldwide is unfeasible and potentially harmful.