Land sparing or wildlife-friendly farming?

What is land sparing, and what is wildlife-friendly farming?

Land sparing is the setting aside of land for biodiversity conservation. Conservation and production are separated in this approach.

Wildlife-friendly farming is the attempt to conserve biodiversity on land that is simultaneously also used to produce agricultural commodities. Conservation and production are integrated in this approach.

Which approach is better?

There has been some debate about whether wildlife-friendly farming or land sparing are better for biodiversity conservation. In our paper, we suggest that both have advantages and disadvantages, and that there is no simple recipe that can be used to work out when either of the two should be used. Land sparing often is associated with a coarse spatial grain, whereas wildlife-friendly farming results in a finer spatial grain in the landscape. The two approaches are different in their strengths and weaknesses, and underlying scientific traditions.

Schematic summary of key differences between land sparing and wildlife-friendly farming

Some general directions for policy from both approaches

Policy guidelines for fine-grained, heterogeneous farming:

• Maintain the existing benefits from fine-grained heterogeneity and encourage agricultural practices that maintain this heterogeneity (eg maintain forest remnants, scattered trees, and crop diversity).

• Restore substantial blocks and networks of native ecosystems through measures such as community initiatives across property boundaries or strategic land acquisition. These measures will benefit species that need large areas and are sensitive to agriculture.

Policy guidelines for coarse-grained, homogeneous farming areas:

• Protect and expand large patches of native vegetation because these provide important source and refuge habitat for species sensitive to agriculture.

• Create connections between existing reserves to increase adaptive capacity in the face of climate change. Connections may be created by traditional corridors or by innovative management strategies within agricultural lands, such as temporary fallows.

• Increase landscape heterogeneity and reduce the grain size of the landscape. Appropriate measures may include diversification of cropping and other land-use activities, the sub-division of fields to create a larger number of smaller fields, the establishment of vegetation along linear features, such as field boundaries and roads, and the enhancement of vegetation structure within agricultural areas.

Policy guidelines for frontier landscapes undergoing rapid land conversion for agriculture:

•Avoid ad-hoc and unregulated intensification, which can lead to “death by a thousand cuts”.

• Actively plan for a mix of land sparing and wildlife-friendly farming where appropriate, taking into account both ecological and social factors. Agricultural intensification without conservation planning is a major threat to biodiversity.

• Create reserves around known regional-scale centers of biodiversity, by identifying priority hot spots, for example.

Acknowledgements

This work was conducted while JF visited Stanford University in 2006. The visit was funded by the Australian Academy of Science.

References

Fischer, J., Brosi, B., Daily, G. C., Ehrlich, P. R., Goldman, R., Goldstein, J., Lindenmayer, D. B., Manning, A. D., Mooney, A. H., Pejchar, L., Ranganathan, J., Tallis, H. (2008). Should agricultural policies encourage land sparing or wildlife-friendly farming? Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.