Fig. 1: Quasi-experimental study design.
From: Landscape diversity promotes landscape functioning in North America
North America was divided into blocks defined by the combination of climate (ecoregions) and space (3˚ latitude × 6˚ longitude grid). In total, the study design encompassed 298 blocks, with a total of 58,280 250×250 m landscape plots. These plots were composed of six different land-cover (LC) types (A: agriculture, F: forest, G: grassland, S: shrubland, U: urban, and W: wetland), resulting in 56 unique LC compositions. Thereby, gradients in land-cover type richness (LCR) were constructed within each block so that the different land covers were represented equally at all levels of LCR (e.g., if a block containing the LC types A, G, and U, the 2-LC mixtures AG, AU, GU were included, and the 3-LC mixture AGU; see Methods and Supplementary Table 1). Each LC composition was replicated 20 times per block.
