CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Enhancing biodiversity-based ecosystem services can generate win?win opportunities for conservation and agricultural production. Pollination and pest control are two essential agricultural services provided by mobile organisms, manydepending on native vegetation networks beyond the farm scale. Many studieshave evaluated the effects of landscape changes on such services at small scales.However, several landscape management policies (e.g. selection of conservationsites) and associated funding allocation occur at much larger spatial scales (e.g.state or regional level). Therefore, it is essential to understand whether the linksbetween landscape, ecosystem services and crop yields are robust across broadand heterogeneous regional conditions.2. Here, we used data from 610 Brazilian municipalities within the Atlantic Forestregion (~50 Mha) and show that forest is a crucial factor affecting coffee yields,regardless of regional variations in soil, climate and management practices. Wefound forest cover surrounding coffee fields was better at predicting coffee yieldsthan forest cover at the municipality level. Moreover, the positive effect of forestcover on coffee yields was stronger for Coffea canephora, the species with higherpollinator dependence, than for Coffea arabica. Overall, coffee yields were highestwhen they were near to forest fragments, mostly in landscapes with intermediateto high forest cover (>20%), above the biodiversity extinction threshold.3. Coffee cover was the most relevant management practice associated with coffeeyield prediction. An increase in crop area was associated with a higher yield, butmostly in high forest covers municipalities. Other localized management practiceslike irrigation, pesticide use, organic manure and honeybee density had little importance in predicting coffee yields than landscape structure parameters. Neitherthe climatic or topographic variables were as relevant as forest cover at predictingcoffee yields.4. Synthesis and application. Our work provides evidence that landscape relationships with ecosystem service provision are consistent across regions with different agricultural practices and environmental conditions. These results provide away in which landscape management can articulate small landscape managementwith regional conservation goals. Policies directed towards increasing landscape interspersion of coffee fields with forest remnants favour spillover process, andcan thus benefit the provision of biodiversity-based ecosystem services, increasing agricultural productivity. Such interventions can generate win?win situationsfavouring biodiversity conservation and increased crop yields across large regions.

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