Conservation Science Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EJ, UK.
Centre for Conservation Science, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy SG19 2DL, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2019 Aug 28;286(1909):20191483. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2019.1483.
Empirical evidence from four continents indicates that human food demand may be best reconciled with biodiversity conservation through sparing natural habitats by boosting agricultural yields. This runs counter to the conservation paradigm of wildlife-friendly farming, which is influential in Europe, where many species are dependent on low-yielding high nature value farmland threatened by both intensification and abandonment. In the first multi-taxon population-level test of land-sparing theory in Europe, we quantified how population densities of 175 bird and sedge species varied with farm yield across 26 squares (each with an area of 1 km) in eastern Poland. We discovered that, as in previous studies elsewhere, simple land sparing, with only natural habitats on spared land, markedly out-performed land sharing in its effect on region-wide projected population sizes. However, a novel 'three-compartment' land-sparing approach, in which about one-third of spared land is assigned to very low-yield agriculture and the remainder to natural habitats, resulted in least-reduced projected future populations for more species. Implementing the three-compartment model would require significant reorganization of current subsidy regimes, but would mean high-yield farming could release sufficient land for species dependent on both natural and high nature value farmland to persist.
来自四大洲的经验证据表明，通过提高农业产量来保护自然栖息地，可能是使人类食物需求与生物多样性保护最和谐的方式。这与欧洲流行的对野生动物友好型农业的保护模式背道而驰，在欧洲，许多物种依赖于低产但具有高自然价值的农田，这些农田受到集约化和废弃的双重威胁。这是在欧洲首次对土地保护理论进行多分类群的种群水平测试，我们量化了在波兰东部的 26 个正方形（每个面积为 1 公里）中，175 种鸟类和莎草物种的种群密度如何随农田产量的变化而变化。我们发现，与以往在其他地方进行的研究一样，仅在保留的自然栖息地中进行简单的土地保护，对区域范围内预测种群规模的影响明显优于土地共享。然而，一种新颖的“三分区”土地保护方法，其中约三分之一的保留土地被分配给低产农业，其余部分用于自然栖息地，对更多物种的未来预测种群数量的减少最少。实施三分区模型需要对当前的补贴制度进行重大调整，但这意味着高产量农业可以释放出足够的土地，使依赖自然和高自然价值农田的物种得以生存。
