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1. Conventional cattle ranching with low plant diversity and a high dependence on chemical fertilisers and herbicides, simplifies ecosystems and negatively affects their functioning. In tropical regions, the cattle ranching systems that use fodder trees and shrubs along with grasses offer a useful landscape management tool that may contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and the stability of ecological processes.

2. Given the functional importance of dung beetles in natural and anthropogenic ecosystems, this study evaluates the recovery of some of the ecological services in which these insects play a role by comparing treeless improved pastures (IP) with those that have been converted into silvopastoral systems (SPS: two species of grass, Cynodon plectostachyus and Pannicum maximum, in association with Leucaena leucocephala trees) in a cattle ranching landscape of the Colombian Andes.

3. The results …