The role of cover crops in improving biodiversity

Biological diversity (i.e. biotic diversity or biodiversity) is defined as the ‘biological variety in an environment as indicated by numbers of different species of organisms’ (Merriam-Webster 2024). However, it can refer to variation at other scales (Duelli and Obrist 2003, Gaston and Spicer 2013, Diaz and Malhi 2022, Dufresnes et al. 2023) and a more comprehensive definition is as follows: ‘The variability among living organisms from all sources including terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part. This includes variation in genetic, phenotypic, phylogenetic, and functional attributes, as well as changes in abundance and distribution over time and space within and among species, biological communities and ecosystems’ (IPBES 2024).