Current global agriculture fails to meet the basic food needs of 687.7 million people. At the same time, our food system is responsible for catastrophic losses of biodiversity. Precision conservation solutions offer the potential to benefit both production systems and natural systems. Transforming low-producing areas on farm fields into ecological refugia may provide small-scale habitat and ecosystem services in fragmented agricultural landscapes. We collaborated with three precision agriculture producers in Montana to see if on-farm ecological refugia support biodiversity, enhance beneficial ecosystem services and increase food production. Two of the studied refugia were naturally occurring areas that are too difficult to cultivate. The third refuge was a low-producing area that was converted to habitat and planted with a native seed mix. Vegetation surveys were conducted on each farm in a radial web design of six transects that started in the refugia center and ran 200 meters into the crop field. On each farm, a sampling web was replicated in a neighboring field that had no refugia. The sampling webs were used to sweep net insects in 20-meter intervals. Small mammal seed predation was tested using 30 seed traps per web where each trap contained two weed and two crop species. Yield data from a combine-mounted monitor was analyzed as a function of distance from the refuge using 20-meter buffer zones.

Plant diversity (Shannon’s index) declined significantly with distance into the crop field for naturally occurring refugia (p-value < 0.1) and insignificantly for the created refuge (p-value = 0.87). According to a Bayesian Kriging interpolation, just as plant diversity decreased with distance from refugia, we would expect beneficial ecosystem services such as pollination or pest-predator habitat provision to decline with distance into the crop field. Non-native species richness was highest in the crop field and lower in refugia, indicating that ecological refugia are not sources of undesirable weedy species. Insect diversity declined significantly with distance from refugia for all refugia (p-value < 0.0001). Fields with naturally occurring refugia had a higher abundance of insects associated with beneficial ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, pest predation and weed control (p-value < 0.05). Fields without naturally occurring refugia had significantly higher abundance of insects associated with yield reduction (p-value < 0.05). The field with a created refuge had a higher abundance of insects associated with yield reduction (p-value = 0.009). Seed trap data indicated that weed seed predation was higher and crop seed predation was lower in one naturally occurring refugia, while the opposite trends occurred in the second refuge. The created refuge had both higher weed seed predation and higher crop seed predation. This suggests that seed predators provide a beneficial service of weed suppression by eating volunteer seeds and a disservice of reducing crop yield by eating newly planted seeds. Lastly, precision agriculture yield maps showed a significant decline in crop yield with distance from refugia (p-value < 0.0001). Future research will assess the feasibility of implementing ecological refugia as a precision conservation practice in agricultural landscapes.