Can land-sharing and land-sparing be combined to meet food demands whilst conserving biodiversity?
Plenty of recent publications re-emphasize the need to halt current biodiversity loss, which in the last few decades has been happening at a significant rate and magnitude. Agriculture is the main driver of vanishing biodiversity, yet there remains a need to meet the food demands of an expanding human population. The debate of how to combine agriculture with conservation is a hot topic, both in science and in politics. In our recent “People and Nature” paper, we argue that land‐sparing (i.e. separating high‐yielding, intensively cultivated agriculture and spared habitat reserves), and land‐sharing (i.e. wildlife‐friendly farming), are both required in combination to address the tradeoff between food production and wildlife conservation in a multifunctional agricultural landscape.
The full news story can be viewed via the British Ecological Society (BES) website