Beyond flower strips – restoring biodiversity needs more landscape heterogeneity

Restoring biodiversity in agricultural landscapes requires non-crop habitats that provide complementary and additional resources to those provided by agricultural land. In the European Union, flower strips have become the most popular restoration measure in the last decade, due to their esthetic value, benefits for flower visitors and fast implementation. However, the overreliance on annual flower strips rather than on landscape-wide habitat diversity undermines the agri-environmental goal of a heterogeneous landscape promoting multitaxa biodiversity. Annual flower strips support only a limited spectrum of plant and animal species and we argue that successful biodiversity conservation needs many types of habitats, such as diversified and small-scale croplands in combination with annual, perennial and woody semi-natural terrestrial habitats as well as running and stagnant freshwater bodies. Spatial and temporal habitat heterogeneity and resource continuity allows for spillover across multiple habitat types, meta-community dynamics, high beta diversity and the provision of major ecosystem services such as crop pollination and biological pest control. Implementation of agri-environmental schemes should be more diversified and broadened from the field and farm to the landscape level, based on collaboration of farmers and other stakeholders. We need to foster socio-ecological multifunctionality in biodiversity-friendly agricultural landscapes characterized by diversified and small-scale farming as well as restoration of at least 20 % semi-natural habitat.