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Agricultural landscapes are mosaics of different land uses. Their vast extent throughout the world means that they have a key role in the conservation of biodiversity. To provide a sound basis for management, it is important to recognise the emergent properties of land mosaics and understand how they influence components of biodiversity. In most studies in agricultural landscapes, inference is restricted to single sites or patches because this is the unit used for sampling and analysis. For mosaic-level inference, sampling must encompass multiple land uses and elements within a mosaic, be aggregated to represent the ‘whole’ mosaic, and be replicated across multiple mosaics. This paper reviews studies in which land mosaics are the unit of replication, to identify the influence on biota of three categories of emergent properties of mosaic structure: the extent of habitat, composition of the mosaic and spatial …