DOI: 10.5061/dryad.8931zcrmn
title: Data from: The roles of non-production vegetation in agroecosystems: a research framework for filling process knowledge gaps in a social-ecological context

description: 1. An ever-expanding human population, climatic changes, and the spread of
 intensive farming practices is putting increasing pressure on
 agroecosystems and their inherent biodiversity. Non-production vegetation
 elements, such as woody patches, riparian margins, and restoration
 plantings, are vital for conserving agroecosystem biodiversity. Further,
 such elements are key building blocks that are manipulated via land
 management, thereby influencing the biotic and abiotic processes that
 underpin functioning agroecosystems. 2. Despite this critical role, there
 has been a lack of synthesis on which types of vegetation elements drive
 and/or support ecological processes, and the mechanisms by which this
 occurs. Using a systematic, quantitative literature review of 342
 articles, we asked: what are the effects of non-production vegetation on
 agroecosystem processes and how are these processes measured within global
 agroecosystems? 3. Woody patches, hedgerows and borders, riparian margins,
 and shelterbelts were the most studied types of non-production vegetation.
 The majority (61%) of studies showed positive effects of non-production
 vegetation on ecological processes, where the presence, level or rate of
 the studied process was increased or enhanced. 4. However, four key
 research gaps were revealed: (1) most studies (83%) used proxies for,
 instead of direct measurements of, ecosystem processes related to
 non-production vegetation; (2) study designs used to investigate
 non-production vegetation effects on ecosystem processes directly were
 largely limited to observational comparisons of non-production vegetation
 types, farm-scale vegetation configurations, and different proximities to
 vegetation in terms of the effect on ecological processes; relatively few
 studies used manipulative experiments (3) the relatively few studies
 directly measuring ecosystem processes were dominated by four process
 categories: invertebrate biocontrol, predator and natural enemy spillover,
 animal movement, and ecosystem cycling, and (4) the methods used to
 directly measure non-production vegetation effects comprised a
 surprisingly limited set of approaches. 5. To fill key research gaps that
 will inform the use of non-production vegetation to enhance agroecosystem
 processes, we present a framework for future research that emphasises the
 need to combine an understanding of human decision making with
 carefully-designed and targeted investigations into the roles of taxa,
 ecosystem processes, and landscape heterogeneity related to non-production
 vegetation, at multiple spatial scales within agroecosystems.
description: 1. We searched the international literature for relevant articles
 following a modified systematic review protocol (Pickering & Byrne
 2014). Relevant articles were defined as those that described primary
 research conducted on farmland that addressed questions regarding any
 ecological function(s) associated with non-production
 vegetation. 2. Five distinct search strings, comprised
 of various keywords (Table S1) were designed to find relevant papers
 addressing the following broad topics related to non-production vegetation
 in agroecosystems; faunal diversity and use of vegetation; spatial
 arrangement of vegetation in the landscape; pests and disease in
 vegetation; weeds in vegetation; abiotic functional responses to
 vegetation. 3. The proportion of relevant articles
 returned by 30 scholarly databases was examined using all five search
 strings, and nine databases were selected based on the proportion of these
 relevant returns: BASE, BioOne, Google Scholar, JSTOR, Jurn, ProQuest,
 Science Direct, Scopus, and Web of Science. 4. Each
 search string was entered into each of the nine databases in turn, and all
 relevant articles were downloaded (where relevance was determined by
 reading the abstract). If no relevant articles were found for the first
 100 returns, we moved on to the next search string.
 5. For every relevant article found, we also checked all citing
 articles using the “Cited by” function in Google Scholar. After the
 initial two databases were searched, we extracted all keywords from papers
 and ranked them by the number of occurrences. We updated the search
 strings to include any commonly-used keywords that were missing from the
 strings. The faunal and spatial searches that were carried out first
 yielded significant overlap relative to our article selection criteria,
 and were ultimately combined into one faunal database.
 6. Once all searches were complete, we extracted and
 cross-referenced all reference lists from the downloaded articles using
 ParsCit (Kan et al. 2011) to compile a final list of articles across all
 searches. 7. A total of 704 articles were read and 342
 were included using the criteria that they were: (1) empirical (not
 modelling or meta-analysis) studies within agroecosystems; and (2) they at
 least discussed the effects of non-production vegetation on processes, not
 just biodiversity, within agroecosystems.
description: The review was based on a series of searches focussed on the role
 of non-production vegetation in terms of its effects on soil and water,
 weed, disease, and faunal properties and processes.  As such, the compiled
 review data are in an excel workbook, with worksheets for each of these
 four aspects.  Each of the four worksheets also has a corresponding
 metadata worksheet that describes the columns and the data
 collected.