Background: Biodiversity loss, partly due to intensification of agriculture, has become a global issue. In this context,
fruit producers have been looking for nature-friendly production methods. By reducing intensive pesticide use and
enhancing orchard management, they aim to create habitats suitable for beneficial organisms. Fruit production, especially
in low-stem orchards, requires several interventions (plant protection, tillage, greenwork) throughout the year,
each of them representing a disturbance. Thus, an expert system that evaluates and aggregates the impact of individual
farming activities on a set of biodiversity indicators would be a valuable tool for developing new, less biodiversitydamaging
scenarios. This expert system should be based on expert knowledge and scientific evidence. Surprisingly,
our literature searches suggested that international journals contain few publications on the impact of most practices
(except pesticide use) in orchards on biodiversity in general and beneficial organisms in particular. However, in the
last decade, an increasing number of published articles have pointed out the rising importance of biodiversity in life
cycle assessment. We therefore compiled and structured the available evidence to (1) assess the state of research on
discrete biodiversity indicators and agricultural practices, (2) identify the literature relevant for assessing production
impact and habitat suitability for supporting biodiversity and (3) provide a wide-ranging overview of existing evidence
of the impact of agricultural practices in fruit orchards on biodiversity.
Methods: A systematic literature search was performed in scientific journals, agronomy magazines and across the
internet in English, German and French. The main reviewer followed a step-by-step eligibility scheme that was validated
by a Kappa test between two reviewers. Additionally, a third reviewer checked a subset of articles. We mapped
a large range of parameters, which were structured in code sets. To compute a study validity assessment, we used
13 parameters that reflected the relevance of each article to the impact of agricultural practices in fruit orchards on
biodiversity indicator species groups.
Results: The search returned 947 included articles. The map identified major differences in the attention given to different
indicators and practices over time, ranging from closely investigated (clusters) to neglected (gaps)—e.g. spiders
and birds or amphibians and reptiles, respectively. The majority of studies were short-term surveys, mainly done in
low-stem orchards. Main areas studied were Western Europe and Eastern North America. The resulting database is
presented along with descriptive statistics of the distribution and abundance of evidence across time, interventions
and outcomes.