Optimising nature conservation outcomes for a given region‐wide level of food production

Abstract

The land sharing‐sparing framework aims to quantify the trade‐off between food production and biodiversity conservation, but it has been criticized for offering, for reasons of simplicity, an unrealistically limited set of different land uses. Here, we develop the framework to evaluate a much larger suite of land‐use strategies in which the areas and yields of three land‐use compartments - natural habitat, high‐yield farmland, and lower‐yield farmland - are varied simultaneously. For two regions of England, we use functions that relate the local population density of breeding bird species to farm yield to simulate species‐specific region‐wide population sizes under each strategy. We find that geometric mean population size, averaged across all species, is maximized when farmland yields are higher than the current average yield, and when spared land combines both natural habitat and low‐yield farmland. This conclusion is relatively insensitive to the maximum yield considered feasible under extreme land sparing, and holds across a range of region‐wide food production targets. To some extent, our conclusion depends on which species groups were included in the assessment. Considered alone, farmland birds preferred a strategy with little or no natural habitat. Nonetheless, the optimal strategy was broadly consistent across all widely recognized listings of species of conservation concern. Synthesis and applications. Our study looks at landscapes with a long history of agricultural use, and which have little remaining natural habitat, such as those found in lowland England. In these landscapes, conservation outcomes are likely to be maximized by mixed strategies in which high‐yield production enables an increase in area of both natural habitat and low‐yield farmland elsewhere in the region.

Proximity to forest mediates trade‐offs between yields and biodiversity of birds in oil palm smallholdings

“…Two different approaches have been proposed to meet growing agricultural demand while mitigating impacts on biodiversity (Finch et al, 2020; Green et al, 2005). One favors increasing the intensity of farming on existing croplands to boost yields, thus reducing the need to convert additional land to agriculture (land sparing).…”

Consequences of underexplored variation in biodiversity indices used for land‐use prioritization

“…Other important factors whose contribution to model variation should be investigated include habitat contiguity, ecosystem intactness (based on land‐cover change or species abundance), direct population estimates as a function of natural habitat and farmland yields (Finch et al. 2020), and phylogenetic and functional diversity (Pollock et al. 2017).…”

“…Though more computationally involved, these approaches allow for a fuller accounting of trade-offs at the species level and may be particularly well suited to small areas, compensating for issues related to a reliance on richness metrics. Other important factors whose contribution to model variation should be investigated include habitat contiguity, ecosystem intactness (based on land-cover change or species abundance), direct population estimates as a function of natural habitat and farmland yields (Finch et al 2020), and phylogenetic and functional diversity (Pollock et al 2017). Of course, decision makers must also consider factors other than biodiversity when making land-use decisions, and balancing biodiversity with other environmental and societal concerns will invariably produce different recommendations (Anderson et al 2009, Nelson et al 2009, Estes et al 2016, Soto-Navarro et al 2020).…”

Concentrating vs. spreading our footprint: how to meet humanity's needs at least cost to nature

“…4b). Most recently, analyses of abundance data for all birds in two UK landscapes, exploring thousands of combinations of yield and area for both high-and low-yield farm compartments, suggest that three-compartment strategies might again provide near-optimal solutions to conserving species assemblages in regions where natural disturbance regimes have been substantially dampened (Finch et al, 2019(Finch et al, , 2020.…”