Reconciling biodiversity conservation, food production and farmers’ demand

Abstract

Agricultural management should consider multiple services and stakeholders. Yet, it remains unclear how to guarantee the provision of ecosystem services that reaches stakeholders demands, especially considering the observed biodiversity decline and the current global change predictions that may affect food security. Here, we use a model to examine how landscape composition - fraction of semi-natural habitat (SNH) - affects biodiversity and crop production services in intensively-managed agricultural systems. We analyse three groups of stakeholders assumed to value different ecosystem services most - individual farmers (crop yield per area), agricultural unions (landscape production) and conservationists (biodiversity). We find that trade-offs among stakeholders demands strongly depend on the degree of pollination dependence of crops, the strength of environmental and demographic stochasticity, and the relative amount of an ecosystem service demanded by each stakeholder, i.e. function thresholds. Intermediate amounts of SNH can allow for the delivery of relatively high levels of the three ecosystem services. Our analysis further suggests that the current levels of SNH protection lie below these intermediate amounts of SNH in intensively-managed agricultural landscapes. Given the worldwide trends in agriculture and global change, these results suggest ways of managing landscapes to reconcile the demands of several actors and ensure for biodiversity conservation and food production.