Earlier this month, Dr. Zia Mehrabi and team published an excellent paper in 'Nature Ecology & Evolution'.
Intensive agriculture with high reliance on pesticides and fertilizers constitutes a major strategy for ‘feeding the world’. However, such conventional intensifcation is linked to diminishing returns and can result in ‘intensification traps’—production declines triggered by the negative feedback of biodiversity loss at high input levels
The paper addresses the double losses in biodiversity and food security associated with these intensification traps - showing that, across a number of contexts, large biodiversity gains could be achieved for small crop productivity losses, and in many contexts loosing biodiversity leads to an intensification trap -- where crop yield is lower with higher levels of inputs.
Give it a read here!
See Zia's other publications here.