Summary
The impact of agricultural land use on biodiversity has been extensively examined through efforts to synthesize available data. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of a thorough synthesis describing the earthworm response to agricultural land-use Our meta-analysis compared undisturbed ecosystems (i.e., undisturbed grassland, primary forest) as controls against agricultural land-use treatments, with data extracted from 113 publications across 44 countries, yielding 1040 pairwise comparisons of earthworm density and biomass, and 536 pairwise comparisons of earthworm diversity. We also evaluated how agricultural land use effects on earthworms depend on soil, climate, and management practices reported in the studies. Arable cropland had significantly lower earthworm density (-18%), biomass (-1
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