Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 114, Issue 42, Pages 11247-11252Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620229114
Keywords
agriculture; agroecosystem services; perennials; US Corn Belt; sustainability
Categories
Funding
- Iowa State University
- Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship
- Iowa Flood Center
- Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture Grants [E2011-20, SI2009]
- McIntire-Stennis Cooperative Forestry Research Program [IOW3805, IOW5354]
- National Science Foundation [0508091]
- USDA Forest Service
- USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Grants [IOW5249, IOW5423]
- USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Grant [H001226911]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [0508091] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services from agricultural lands remain important challenges in the United States despite decades of spending on natural resource management. To date, conservation investment has emphasized engineering practices or vegetative strategies centered on monocultural plantings of nonnative plants, largely excluding native species from cropland. In a catchment-scale experiment, we quantified the multiple effects of integrating strips of native prairie species amid corn and soybean crops, with prairie strips arranged to arrest run-off on slopes. Replacing 10% of cropland with prairie strips increased biodiversity and ecosystem services with minimal impacts on crop production. Compared with catchments containing only crops, integrating prairie strips into cropland led to greater catchment-level insect taxa richness (2.6-fold), pollinator abundance (3.5-fold), native bird species richness (2.1-fold), and abundance of bird species of greatest conservation need (2.1-fold). Use of prairie strips also reduced total water runoff from catchments by 37%, resulting in retention of 20 times more soil and 4.3 times more phosphorus. Corn and soybean yields for catchments with prairie strips decreased only by the amount of the area taken out of crop production. Social survey results indicated demand among both farming and nonfarming populations for the environmental outcomes produced by prairie strips. If federal and state policies were aligned to promote prairie strips, the practice would be applicable to 3.9 million ha of cropland in Iowa alone.
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