Abstract

Agricultural intensification and land clearing for agriculture has resulted in loss of biodiversity worldwide, land degradation and reduced the quality of ecosystems services that assist agriculture. Vegetative strips such as hedgerows and shelterbelts have the potential to provide ecosystem service benefits that improve agricultural production and environmental sustainability. A complex, interdisciplinary body of evidence exists examining the various social, physical, chemical, biological and ecological effects of vegetative strips. Here we provide an update to a systematic map of evidence regarding the social and environmental effects of vegetative strips within boreal and temperate regions. We track temporal changes in research trends since the previous map published on this topic in 2015. We followed the approach the previous map, searching databases using an identical search string. We used pre-defined eligibility criteria and layered article screening, reporting the reasons for article exclusion. We extracted meta-data and descriptively summarised the results to allow comparison to the previous map, producing an interactive database that serves as a comprehensive and up-to-date map of new evidence on top of the previous findings. We found many trends that were consistent with the previous map, including terminology trends, study regions, vegetative strip type, strip location and measured outcomes. We also found that there were key changes in the publication frequency of studies examining some biodiversity-related ecosystem services. In addition, several knowledge gaps identified in the previous map have been filled. A small number of countries in the Global North continue to drive major changes in publication trends.