Land sparing or sharing: Strategies for conservation of arable plant diversity

Strategies to achieve agricultural production and biodiversity conservation fall into two categories, land-sparing or land-sharing. Plant species richness under organic arable (land sharing) versus conventional with land set-aside for sparing) was evaluated on adjacent farms compare these strategies. Sampled plant significantly higher than arable, as expected, but very similar set-aside. Nevertheless, the Chao1 estimator of total indicated that larger area available plants may sustain more scarce leading a richness. It appears value sparing sharing depends relative portion spared (set-aside) compared shared (organic), not conventionally cropped land. Furthermore, in theory land-shared use will have greater capacity populations low-density simply due 100 % being species. These are an important principals assessing strategies seeking balance just all uses.