Habitat fragmentation and food security in crop pollination systems

Abstract

Ensuring stable food supplies is recognized as a major challenge for the 21st century, and one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Biodiversity-based approaches to food security are increasingly being supported based on the fact that biodiversity can increase and stabilize crop yields. But agricultural systems are often highly fragmented and it is unclear how such fragmentation affects biodiversity and food production, limiting our capacity to manage agricultural landscapes for food security. Here, we develop a model of crop yield dynamics to investigate how fragmentation of natural habitats for agricultural conversion impacts food production, with a focus on crop pollination. Our results show that fragmentation produces spatial and biodiversity-mediated effects that affect the mean and stability of pollination-dependent crops, with strong consequences for food security. The net effects of fragmentation depend on the strength of the spillover of pollinators to crop land and the degree to which crops depend on animal pollination. Our study sheds new light in the food security debate by showing that high and stable yields depend on biodiversity and the spatial structure of agricultural landscapes, and by revealing the ecological mechanisms of food security in crop pollination systems.