Hidden in plain sight: Opportunities to restore degraded farmland to perennial grasslands for biodiversity conservation

Insects are rapidly declining. Any effort to stall or reverse decline will require restoration on working lands, especially farmland. On farms, there are opportunities for conservation that, within farms, can be small; yet, collectively, they add to millions of acres of conservation opportunities. Targets for conservation are consistently underyielding crop lands, including over twenty million acres in the Midwestern US. Taking these lands out of production and restoring them to grasslands can be economically profitable. Working in long term experiments, we tested the effects of restoring perennial grasslands within or on the edge of croplands in the form of prairie strips on biodiversity and ecosystem services. We found that prairie strips increase biodiversity, for example of butterflies, spiders, and beetles, and increase ecosystem services, including pollination and biological control of pests. Though these restored areas are highly exposed to farm activities, they are not ecological traps; rather, they are refuges for diverse insect groups. Taken together, within field restoration increases biodiversity locally, and can have widespread benefits across working landscapes.