Ecological economics in agricultural landscapes

This work is a collaboration with Vincent Martinet, INRA.

In Europe, agricultural landscapes represent roughly half of the land, and consist in evolving mosaics of fields influenced by fluctuations of the economic context. Their composition and dynamics greatly affect biological populations through land-use changes (and much biodiversity is actually present in agricultural landscapes).

From these land-use changes stems my interest for ecological economics: decisions of land-use affecting biological populations (e.g. insects, micromammals, passerine birds) belong to private owners (farmers), hence creating a rationale to study how economics can be used for conservation purposes (pdf here).

We have been quite interested in the land sparing v.s. land sharing debate, i.e is it best to focus on farming-free reserves to protect biodiversity, or should we encourage more wildlife-friendly farming? A preprint here.

Pictures: Left: a real map of agricultural landscape, from Chizé, France (data: V. Bretagnolle, CNRS). Right, the sort of idealized landscape we use in some models (which, unfortunately, is sometimes not such a bad approximation...)