Bright spots in agricultural landscapes: Identifying areas exceeding expectations for multifunctionality and biodiversity

Abstract

Agriculture's influence on humanity is a dichotomy of promise and peril. Research on the food‐environment dilemma has highlighted the environmental consequences of food production, yet the identification of management solutions is an ongoing challenge. We suggest “bright spots” as a promising tool to identify levers of change by finding areas that exceed expectations for goals, such as agricultural landscape multifunctionality and biodiversity. We identified bright, dark and average spots within a complex agricultural landscape and explored the associated socioeconomic patterns. We found that areas exceeding expectations for biodiversity and landscape multifunctionality were neither spatially congruent nor in conflict. It was more common for areas to underperform (dark spots) for both biodiversity and multifunctionality than over perform for both (bright spots). While dark spots for multifunctionality were alike in their ecosystem service composition, bright spots were bright in multiple, diverse ways. The socioeconomic attributes that characterize bright and darks spots included both farm characteristics as well as farming practices, suggesting that both have potential to be levers of change. Synthesis and applications. Our results suggest that while biodiversity and landscape multifunctionality show similar spatial patterns due to underlying biophysical drivers, managing for biodiversity or landscape multifunctionality alone will not implicitly achieve the other in this system. Bright spots (areas exceeding expectations) in multifunctionality were associated with many different combinations of ecosystem services, but dark spots were uniquely agricultural intensive areas devoted to maximizing crop production at the expense of all other services. From a management perspective, specific farm characteristics and farming practices may impact the potential for multifunctionality: increased mechanization, increased agricultural inputs and larger farm size and capital were associated with dark spots, while smaller farms with potentially greater space for innovation were associated with bright spots.

Bright spots among lakes in the Rideau Valley Watershed, Ontario

“…This study stands as an additional example of using a bright spots framework to explore the connections between ecological outcomes and variation in management strategies on an unexplored landscape of a lake region. Similar studies have been conducted on a global scale looking at coral reef biomass (Cinner et al 2016) as well as on a regional scale looking at agricultural landscapes (Frei et al 2018). Using bright spots studies as templates, managers on many scales can adapt solutions to their own contexts, creating a clear link between conservation research and policies (Cvitanovic and Hobday 2018).…”

“…2). Again, bright and dark spots are not the sites with the greatest or lowest water clarity, but rather those that had the largest magnitudes of deviation from the expected water clarity value generated by the predictive model based on their set biophysical conditions (Cinner et al 2016, Frei et al 2018.…”

“…Through identifying "bright spots," systems or parts of systems that are performing much better than expected relative to the usual predictors, and searching for commonalities among them, scientists can sometimes identify unexplored drivers (Cinner et al 2016). The bright spots approach has been used to identify previously unexplored social arrangements that were maintaining healthy fisheries on world's coral reefs (Cinner et al 2016), and to identify socioeconomic attributes of multifunctional agricultural landscapes (Frei et al 2018).…”

Characteristics of Positive Deviants in Western Chimpanzee Populations

“…Similarities between areas where species are doing exceptionally well, called exceptional responders (Post and Geldmann, 2018), bright spots (Cinner et al, 2016), or positive deviants (Marsh et al, 2004), could highlight novel solutions to conservation challenges (Cinner et al, 2016;Post and Geldmann, 2018). While this approach has been used widely in medicine and social sciences, applications in ecology and conservation are still rare (Cinner et al, 2016;Frei et al, 2018). Applied to species conservation this approach entails identifying those social-ecological conditions in which a species is likely to persist.…”

The effects of landscape structure and crop management on insect community and associated ecosystem services and disservices within coffee plantation

“…Understanding how landscape features affect beta diversity is crucial to aid decision makers and conservationists in selecting appropriate indicators and spatial scales for species conservation (Clough et al 2007). Moreover, integrating alpha and beta diversity could be a way to accommodate multiple ecosystem services at the landscape level (Frei et al 2018;Rodríguez-Loinaz et al 2014).…”