Abstract

Significance Agricultural landscape homogenization is a major ongoing threat to biodiversity and the delivery of key ecosystem services for human well-being. It is well known that increasing the amount of seminatural cover in agricultural landscapes has a positive effect on biodiversity. However, little is known about the role of the crop mosaic itself. Crop heterogeneity in the landscape had a much stronger effect on multitrophic diversity than the amount of seminatural cover in the landscape, across 435 agricultural landscapes located in 8 European and North American regions. Increasing crop heterogeneity can be an effective way to mitigate the impacts of farming on biodiversity without taking land out of production.