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Global social and economic changes, alongside climate change, are affecting the operating environment for agriculture, leading to efforts to increase production and yields, typically through the use of agrochemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, expanded irrigation, and changes in seed varieties. Intensification, alongside the expansion of agriculture into new areas, has increased harvest, but has also had numerous well-known impacts on the environment, ultimately resulting in a loss of resilience and lack of sustainability in agro-ecosystems. Combined with features of agricultural systems such as the differential movement of ecosystem services, and interactions among ecosystem services driven in part by management choices, such intensification has disrupted key feedbacks in agricultural systems. These changes have tended to perpetuate the management choices that have led to efficient, productive agriculture, often at the expense of nature and the provision of important nonfood ecosystem services. Here, we explore how agriculture functions as a complex adaptive system. We assess how recent changes have interacted with agro-ecosystem features to result in a loss of resilience, and suggest key research directions to help harmonize production and ecosystem function, drawing primarily on Canadian examples. Enhancing the resilience of agricultural landscapes is critical to the long-term sustainability of agriculture in a rapidly changing world.

Recent synthesis studies have shown inconsistent responses of crop pests to landscape composition, imposing a fundamental limit to our capacity to design sustainable crop protection strategies to reduce yield losses caused by insect pests. Using a global dataset composed of 5242 observations encompassing 48 agricultural pest species and 26 crop species, we tested the role of pest traits (exotic status, host breadth and habitat breadth) and environmental context (crop type, range in landscape gradient and climate) in modifying the pest response to increasing semi-natural habitats in the surrounding landscape. For natives, increasing semi-natural habitats decreased the abundance of pests that exploit only crop habitats or that are highly polyphagous. On the contrary, populations of exotic pests increased with an increasing cover of semi-natural habitats. These effects might be related to changes in host plants and other resources across the landscapes and/or to modified top-down control by natural enemies. The range of the landscape gradient explored and climate did not affect pests, while crop type modified the response of pests to landscape composition. Although species traits and environmental context helped in explaining some of the variability in pest response to landscape composition, the observed large interspecific differences suggest that a portfolio of strategies must be considered and implemented for the effective control of rapidly changing communities of crop pests in agroecosystems.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that plant species diversity enhances ecosystem functioning in terrestrial ecosystems, including diversity effects on insects (herbivores, predators and parasitoids) and plants. However, the effects of increased plant diversity across trophic levels in different ecosystems and biomes have not yet been explored on a global scale. Through a global meta-analysis of 2,914 observations from 351 studies, we found that increased plant species richness reduced herbivore abundance and damage but increased predator and parasitoid abundance, predation, parasitism and overall plant performance. Moreover, increased predator/parasitoid performance was correlated with reduced herbivore abundance and enhanced plant performance. We conclude that increasing plant species diversity promotes beneficial trophic interactions between insects and plants, ultimately contributing to increased ecosystem services.

Globally, most wildlife lives outside of protected areas, creating potential conflicts between the needs of wildlife and the needs of humans. East African savannas epitomize this challenge, providing habitat for wildlife such as giraffes and elephants as well as for people and their livestock. Conflicts over land use are common, leading to the assumption of a necessary trade-off between wildlife and livestock management. Here, we show that the integration of livestock and wildlife in a large region of central Kenya can have ecological benefits, reducing the abundance of ticks and improving forage. These ecological benefits can be complemented by economic ones when property owners derive income both from wildlife through tourism and from livestock through meat and dairy production. Our results suggest that under specific ecological, economic and social conditions, integrating livestock with wildlife can provide benefits for the environment and for human well-being in African savannas. Most wildlife lives outside protected areas, creating potential conflicts with humans. This study assesses potential trade-offs between wildlife and livestock management in an East African savanna, finding potential ecological and economic benefits from integrating the two.

1. Agriculture's influence on humanity is a dichotomy of promise and peril. Research on the food‐environment dilemma has highlighted the environmental consequences of food production, yet the identification of management solutions is an ongoing challenge. 2. We suggest “bright spots” as a promising tool to identify levers of change by finding areas that exceed expectations for goals, such as agricultural landscape multifunctionality and biodiversity. 3. We identified bright, dark and average spots within a complex agricultural landscape and explored the associated socioeconomic patterns. We found that areas exceeding expectations for biodiversity and landscape multifunctionality were neither spatially congruent nor in conflict. It was more common for areas to underperform (dark spots) for both biodiversity and multifunctionality than over perform for both (bright spots). 4. While dark spots for multifunctionality were alike in their ecosystem service composition, bright spots were bright in multiple, diverse ways. The socioeconomic attributes that characterize bright and darks spots included both farm characteristics as well as farming practices, suggesting that both have potential to be levers of change. 5. Synthesis and applications. Our results suggest that while biodiversity and landscape multifunctionality show similar spatial patterns due to underlying biophysical drivers, managing for biodiversity or landscape multifunctionality alone will not implicitly achieve the other in this system. Bright spots (areas exceeding expectations) in multifunctionality were associated with many different combinations of ecosystem services, but dark spots were uniquely agricultural intensive areas devoted to maximizing crop production at the expense of all other services. From a management perspective, specific farm characteristics and farming practices may impact the potential for multifunctionality: increased mechanization, increased agricultural inputs and larger farm size and capital were associated with dark spots, while smaller farms with potentially greater space for innovation were associated with bright spots.

Natural control of invertebrate crop pests has the potential to complement or replace conventional insecticide-based practices, but its mainstream application is hampered by predictive unreliability across agroecosystems. Inconsistent responses of natural pest control to changes in landscape characteristics have been attributed to ecological complexity and system-specific conditions. Here, we review agroecological models and their potential to provide predictions of natural pest control across agricultural landscapes. Existing models have used a multitude of techniques to represent specific crop-pest-enemy systems at various spatiotemporal scales, but less wealthy regions of the world are underrepresented. A realistic representation of natural pest control across systems appears to be hindered by a practical trade-off between generality and realism. Nonetheless, observations of context-sensitive, trait-mediated responses of natural pest control to land-use gradients indicate the potential of ecological models that explicitly represent the underlying mechanisms. We conclude that modelling natural pest control across agroecosystems should exploit existing mechanistic techniques towards a framework of contextually bound generalizations. Observed similarities in causal relationships can inform the functional grouping of diverse agroecosystems worldwide and the development of the respective models based on general, but context-sensitive, ecological mechanisms. The combined use of qualitative and quantitative techniques should allow the flexible integration of empirical evidence and ecological theory for robust predictions of natural pest control across a wide range of agroecological contexts and levels of knowledge availability. We highlight challenges and promising directions towards developing such a general modelling framework. (Less)

Many decision-makers are looking to science to clarify how nature supports human well-being. Scientists' responses have typically focused on empirical models of the provision of ecosystem services (ES) and resulting decision-support tools. Although such tools have captured some of the complexities of ES, they can be difficult to adapt to new situations. Globally useful tools that predict the provision of multiple ES under different decision scenarios have proven challenging to develop. Questions from decision-makers and limitations of existing decision-support tools indicate three crucial research frontiers for incorporating cutting-edge ES science into decision-support tools: (1) understanding the complex dynamics of ES in space and time, (2) linking ES provision to human well-being, and (3) determining the potential for technology to substitute for or enhance ES. We explore these frontiers in-depth, explaining why each is important and how existing knowledge at their cutting edges can be incorporated to improve ES decision-making tools.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Crops and livestock play a synergistic role in global food production and farmer livelihoods. Increasingly, however, crops and livestock are produced in isolation, particularly in farms operating at the commercial scale. It has been suggested that re-integrating crop and livestock systems at the field and farm level could help reduce the pollution associated with modern agricultural production and increase yields. Despite this potential, there has been no systematic review to assess remaining knowledge gaps in both the social and ecological dimensions of integrated crop and livestock systems (ICLS), particularly within commercial agricultural systems. Based on a multi-disciplinary workshop of international experts and additional literature review, we assess the current knowledge and remaining uncertainties about large-scale, commercial ICLS and identify the source of remaining knowledge gaps to establish priorities for future research. We find that much is understood about nutrient flows, soil quality, crop performance, and animal weight gain in commercial ICLS, but there is little knowledge about its spatial extent, animal behavior or welfare in ICLS, or the tradeoffs between biodiversity, pest and disease control, greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation, and drought and heat tolerance in ICLS. There is some evidence regarding the economic outcomes in commercial ICLS and supply chain and policy barriers to adoption, but little understanding of broader social outcomes or cultural factors influencing adoption. Many of these knowledge gaps arise from a basic lack of data at both the field and system scales, which undermines both statistical analysis and modeling efforts. Future priorities for the international community of researchers investigating the tradeoffs and scalability of ICLS include: methods standardization to better facilitate international collaborations and comparisons, continued social organization for better data utilization and collaboration, meta-analyses to answer key questions from existing data, the establishment of long term experiments and surveys in key regions, a portal for citizen science, and more engagement with ICLS farmers.

Because wildlife and livestock compete for grazing resources, biodiversity conservation and livestock ranching typically have been portrayed as conflicting uses of African savannas. Here, we offer an alternative perspective by describing a savanna ecosystem in central Kenya where wildlife and livestock exhibit a suite of potential positive interactions. For example, treating livestock with an acaricide offers the unintended benefit of removing ticks from the landscape, a result that has now been shown to occur at both large and small scales. When humans derive financial benefits both from wildlife (through tourism) and from livestock (through food production), they may achieve greater economic stability than when income is derived solely from one source. The integrated management of wildlife and livestock can simultaneously improve human health and wildlife conservation. Optimization of human and wildlife benefits will require the management of ecological and socioeconomic trade-offs when conflicts occur between stakeholders.

Fil: Díaz, Sandra. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Diversidad Biológica y Ecología. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina. Fil: Díaz, Sandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnica. Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal; Argentina. Fil: Zafra Calvo, Noelia. Future Earth; España. Fil: Purvis, Andy. Natural History Museum; Reino Unido. Fil: Verburg, Peter H. VU University Amsterdam. Institute for Environmental Studies: Países Bajos. Fil: Obura, David. Coastal Oceans Research and Development Indian Ocean; Kenia. Fil: Leadley, Paul. Université Paris-Sud. Ecologie Systématique Evolution; Francia. Fil: Chaplin Kramer, Rebecca. Stanford University. Natural Capital Project; Estados Unidos. Fil: De Meester, Luc. Leibniz Institut für Gewässerökologie und Binnenfischerei; Alemania. Fil: Dulloo, Ehsan. Bioversity International; Mauricio. Fil: Martín- López, Berta. Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Faculty of Sustainability; Alemania. Fil: Shaw, Rebecca. The World Wide Fund for Nature; Estados Unidos. Fil: Visconti, Piero. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Ecosystem Services and Management Program; Austria. Fil: Broadgate, Wendy. Future Earth; Suecia. Fil: Bruford, Michael W. Cardiff University. School of Biosciences and Sustainable Places Institute; Reino Unido. Fil: Burgess, Neil D. UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido. Fil: Cavender Bares, Jeannine. University of Minnesota. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior; Estados Unidos. Fil: DeClerck, Fabrice. EAT Foundation; Noruega. Fil: Fernández Palacios, José María. Universidad de La Laguna. Instituto Universitario de Enfermedades Tropicales y Salud Pública de Canarias; España. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Hill, Samantha L. L. UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Reino Unido. Fil: Isbell, Forest. University of Minnesota. Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior; Estados Unidos. Fil: Khoury, Colin K. International Center for Tropical Agriculture; Colombia. Fil: Krug, Cornelia B. University of Zurich. Department of Geography; Suiza. Fil: Liu, Jianguo. Michigan State University; Estados Unidos. Fil: Maron, Martine. The University of Queensland; Australia. Fil: McGowan, Philip J. K. Newcastle University. School of Natural and Environmental Sciences; Reino Unido. Fil: Pereira, Henrique M. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research; Alemania. Fil: Reyes García, Victoria. Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies; España. Fil: Rocha, Juan. Future Earth; Suecia. Fil: Rondinini, Carlo. Sapienza University of Rome. Department of Biology and Biotechnologies. Global Mammal Assessment Program; Italia. Fil: Shannon, Lynne. University of Cape Town. Department of Biological Sciences; Sudáfrica. Fil: Shin, Yunne-Jai. University of Cape Town. Department of Biological Sciences; Sudáfrica. Fil: Snelgrove, Paul V. R. Memorial University of Newfoundland. Departments of Ocean Sciences and Biology; Canada. Fil: Spehn, Eva M. Swiss Academy of Sciences. Swiss Biodiversity Forum; Suiza. Fil: Strassburg, Bernardo. Pontifical Catholic University. Department of Geography and the Environment. Rio Conservation and Sustainability Science Centre; Brasil. Fil: Subramanian, Suneetha M. United Nations University. Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability; Japón. Fil: Tewksbury, Joshua J. University of Colorado; Estados Unidos. Fil: Watson, James E. M. Wildlife Conservation Society; Estados Unidos. Fil: Zanne, Amy E. George Washington University. Department of Biological Sciences; Estados Unidos. Global biodiversity policy is at a crossroads. Recent global assessments of living nature (1, 2) and climate (3) show worsening trends and a rapidly narrowing window for action. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has recently announced that none of the 20 Aichi targets for biodiversity it set in 2010 has been reached and only six have been partially achieved (4). Against this backdrop, nations are now negotiating the next generation of the CBD's global goals [see supplementary materials (SM)], due for adoption in 2021, which will frame actions of governments and other actors for decades to come. In response to the goals proposed in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) made public by the CBD (5), we urge negotiators to consider three points that are critical if the agreed goals are to stabilize or reverse nature's decline. First, multiple goals are required because of nature's complexity, with different facets—genes, populations, species, deep evolutionary history, ecosystems, and their contributions to people—having markedly different geographic distributions and responses to human drivers. Second, interlinkages among these facets mean that goals must be defined and developed holistically rather than in isolation, with potential to advance multiple goals simultaneously and minimize trade-offs between them. Third, only the highest level of ambition in setting each goal, and implementing all goals in an integrated manner, will give a realistic chance of stopping—and beginning to reverse—biodiversity loss by 2050.

Scenario-based modelling is a powerful tool to describe relationships between plausible trajectories of drivers, possible policy interventions, and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Model inter-comparisons are key in quantifying uncertainties and identifying avenues for model improvement but have been missing among the global biodiversity and ecosystem services modelling communities. The biodiversity and ecosystem services scenario-based inter-model comparison (BES-SIM) aims to fill this gap. We used global land-use and climate projections to simulate possible future impacts on terrestrial biodiversity and ecosystem services using a variety of models and a range of harmonized metrics. The goal of this paper is to reflect on the steps taken in BES-SIM, identify remaining methodological challenges, and suggest pathways for improvement. We identified five major groups of challenges; the need to: 1) better account for the role of nature in future human development storylines; 2) improve the representation of drivers in the scenarios by increasing the resolution (temporal, spatial and thematic) of land-use as key driver of biodiversity change and including additional relevant drivers; 3) explicitly integrate species- and trait-level biodiversity in ecosystem services models; 4) expand the coverage of the multiple dimensions of biodiversity and ecosystem services; and finally, 5) incorporate time-series or one-off historical data in the calibration and validation of biodiversity and ecosystem services models. Addressing these challenges would allow the development of more integrated global projections of biodiversity and ecosystem services, thereby improving their policy relevance in supporting the interlinked international conservation and sustainable development agendas.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) emphasize the global and multi-dimensional nature of sustainability and thus require improving our capacity to articulate and trace the impact of ecosystem change to measures of human well-being. Yet, the integrated nature of these goals is challenging to assess without similarly integrated assessment tools. We present a new modeling toolkit, "Mapping Ecosystem Services to Human well-being" (MESH), that integrates commonly used, stand-alone ecosystem services (ES) models from the InVEST suite of models to quantify and illustrate the trade-offs and synergies across five ecosystem services and up to 10 associated SDGs. Development of the software and its functionality were informed by a broad stakeholder consultation with ministries, non-governmental organizations and civil society groups in West Africa to identify common barriers to uptake and application of modeling tools in developing countries. In light of this process, key features included in MESH are (1) integration of multiple ecosystem service (ES) models into a common modeling framework supported by a curated base data set, (2) built-in scenario generation capacity to support policy analysis, (3) visualization of outcomes and trade-offs, and (4) mapping of ecosystem service change to SDG targets and goals. We illustrate the use of MESH in a case study in the Volta basin of West Africa comparing the effectiveness of three alternative conservation prioritization approaches: (1) land cover-based, (2) topographic-based, and (3) an ecosystem service-based approach to minimize the impact of agricultural expansion. We evaluate these approaches by linking changes in service supply to potential impacts on achievement of specific SDG goals and targets.

Despite decades of study, conservation biocontrol via manipulation of landscape elements has not become a mainstream strategy for pest control. Meanwhile, conservation groups and governments rarely consider the impacts of land management on pest control, and growers can even fear that conservation biocontrol strategies may exacerbate pest problems. By finding leverage points among these actors, there may be opportunities to align them to promote more widespread adoption of conservation biological control at the landscape-scale. But are ecologists measuring the right things and presenting the right evidence to enable such alignment? We articulate key concerns of growers, conservation groups, and governments with regards to implementing conservation biological control at the landscape scale and argue that if ecologists want to gain more traction, we need to reconsider what we measure, for what goals, and for which audiences. A wider set of landscape objectives that ecologists should consider in our measurements include risk management for growers and co-benefits of multifunctional landscapes for public actors. Ecologists need to shift our paradigm toward longer-term, dynamic measurements, and build cross-disciplinary understanding with socioeconomic and behavioral sciences, to enable better integration of the objectives of these diverse actors that will be necessary for landscape management for conservation biocontrol to achieve its full potential.

The idea that noncrop habitat enhances pest control and represents a win–win opportunity to conserve biodiversity and bolster yields has emerged as an agroecological paradigm. However, while noncrop habitat in landscapes surrounding farms sometimes benefits pest predators, natural enemy responses remain heterogeneous across studies and effects on pests are inconclusive. The observed heterogeneity in species responses to noncrop habitat may be biological in origin or could result from variation in how habitat and biocontrol are measured. Here, we use a pest-control database encompassing 132 studies and 6,759 sites worldwide to model natural enemy and pest abundances, predation rates, and crop damage as a function of landscape composition. Our results showed that although landscape composition explained significant variation within studies, pest and enemy abundances, predation rates, crop damage, and yields each exhibited different responses across studies, sometimes increasing and sometimes decreasing in landscapes with more noncrop habitat but overall showing no consistent trend. Thus, models that used landscape-composition variables to predict pest-control dynamics demonstrated little potential to explain variation across studies, though prediction did improve when comparing studies with similar crop and landscape features. Overall, our work shows that surrounding noncrop habitat does not consistently improve pest management, meaning habitat conservation may bolster production in some systems and depress yields in others. Future efforts to develop tools that inform farmers when habitat conservation truly represents a win–win would benefit from increased understanding of how landscape effects are modulated by local farm management and the biology of pests and their enemies., This work was supported through the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) National Science Foundation Award DBI-1052875 for the project “Evidence and Decision-Support Tools for Controlling Agricultural Pests with Conservation Interventions” organized by D.S.K. and R.C.-K

In her 1998 essay in Science (http://io.aibs.org/sci1), Jane Lubchenco boldly called for a new “Social Contract for Science,” one that would acknowledge the scope and scale of environmental problems and have “all scientists devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day in proportion to their importance.” We were entering a new millennium, and Lubchenco was worried that the scientific enterprise was unprepared to address the challenges related to climate change, pollution, health, and technology. Here we are, 20 years later, and our global challenges have only grown in complexity and urgency. Never before have we had such a clear understanding of our environmental crises and yet also been so far from delivering the investment in actionable research that Lubchenco called for. If the March for Science is any indication, researchers are ready to engage. But will universities — both leaders and the faculty who govern—acknowledge the need for reform?

Agricultural intensification is a leading cause of global biodiversity loss, which can reduce the provisioning of ecosystem services in managed ecosystems. Organic farming and plant diversification are farm management schemes that may mitigate potential ecological harm by increasing species richness and boosting related ecosystem services to agroecosystems. What remains unclear is the extent to which farm management schemes affect biodiversity components other than species richness, and whether impacts differ across spatial scales and landscape contexts. Using a global metadataset, we quantified the effects of organic farming and plant diversification on abundance, local diversity (communities within fields), and regional diversity (communities across fields) of arthropod pollinators, predators, herbivores, and detritivores. Both organic farming and higher in‐field plant diversity enhanced arthropod abundance, particularly for rare taxa. This resulted in increased richness but decreased evenness. While these responses were stronger at local relative to regional scales, richness and abundance increased at both scales, and richness on farms embedded in complex relative to simple landscapes. Overall, both organic farming and in‐field plant diversification exerted the strongest effects on pollinators and predators, suggesting these management schemes can facilitate ecosystem service providers without augmenting herbivore (pest) populations. Our results suggest that organic farming and plant diversification promote diverse arthropod metacommunities that may provide temporal and spatial stability of ecosystem service provisioning. Conserving diverse plant and arthropod communities in farming systems therefore requires sustainable practices that operate both within fields and across landscapes., EML and DC were supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, under award number 2014‐51106‐22096. BMF was supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development‐CNPq, Brasília, Brazil #305062/2007‐7. SGP and MO were supported by the Felix Trust and STEP Project (EC FP7 244090).

Sustainability is a key challenge for humanity in the 21st century. Ecosystem services—the benefits that people derive from nature and natural capital—is a concept often used to help explain human reliance on nature and frame the decisions we make in terms of the ongoing value of nature to human wellbeing. Yet ecosystem service science has not always lived up to the promise of its potential. Despite advances in the scientific literature, ecosystem service science has not yet answered some of the most critical questions posed by decision-makers in the realm of sustainability. Here, we explore the history of ecosystem service science, discuss advances in conceptualization and measurement, and point toward further work needed to improve the use of ecosystem service in decisions about sustainable development.

Ecologists and farmers often have contrasting perceptions about the value of natural habitat in agricultural production landscapes, which so far has been little acknowledged in ecology and conservation. Ecologists and conservationists often appreciate the contribution of natural habitat to biodiversity and potential ecosystem services such as biological pest control, whereas many farmers see habitat remnants as a waste of cropland or source of pests. While natural habitat has been shown to increase pest control in many systems, we here identify five hypotheses for when and why natural habitat can fail to support biological pest control, and illustrate each with case studies from the literature: (1) pest populations have no effective natural enemies in the region, (2) natural habitat is a greater source of pests than natural enemies, (3) crops provide more resources for natural enemies than does natural habitat, (4) natural habitat is insufficient in amount, proximity, composition, or configuration to provide large enough enemy populations needed for pest control, and (5) agricultural practices counteract enemy establishment and biocontrol provided by natural habitat. In conclusion, we show that the relative importance of natural habitat for biocontrol can vary dramatically depending on type of crop, pest, predator, land management, and landscape structure. This variation needs to be considered when designing measures aimed at enhancing biocontrol services through restoring or maintaining natural habitat.

International audience; Numerous studies show that landscape simplification reduces abundance and diversity of natural enemies in agroecosystems, but its effect on natural pest control remains poorly quantified. Further, natural enemy impacts on pest populations have usually been estimated for a limited number of taxa and have not considered interactions among predator species. In a quantitative synthesis with data collected from several cropping systems in Europe and North America, we analyzed how the level and within-field spatial stability of natural pest control services was related to the simplification of the surrounding landscape. All studies used aphids as a model species and exclusion cages to measure aphid pest control. Landscape simplification was quantified by the proportion of cultivated land within a 1 km radius around each plot. We found a consistent negative effect of landscape simplification on the level of natural pest control, despite interactions among enemies. Average level of pest control was 46% lower in homogeneous landscapes dominated by cultivated land, as compared with more complex landscapes. Landscape simplification did not affect the amount of positive or negative interactions among ground-dwelling and vegetation-dwelling predators, or the within-field stability of pest control. Our synthesis demonstrates that agricultural intensification through landscape simplification has negative effects on the level of natural pest control with important implications for management to maintain and enhance ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. Specifically, preserving and restoring semi-natural habitats emerges as a fundamental first step to maintain and enhance pest control services provided by predatory arthropods to agriculture.