Land-sparing vs land-sharing with incomplete policies

Reframing the land-sparing/land-sharing debate for biodiversity conservation.

Conservation biologists are devoting an increasing amount of energy to debating whether land sparing (high-yielding agriculture on a small land footprint) or land sharing (low-yielding, wildlife-friendly agriculture on a larger land footprint) will promote better outcomes for local and global biodiversity. In turn, concerns are mounting about how to feed the world, given increasing demands for ...

Land sparing, land sharing, and the fate of Africa's lions.

Taxonomic bias in organismal research and conservation is well recognized, with focus disproportionately directed toward birds and mammals (1). Among mammals, carnivores often receive excessive attention and large carnivores are particularly well studied (2). Although papers reporting the population trends of a single species do not usually result in high-profile publications, an analysis of po...

Should agricultural policies encourage land sparing or wildlife-friendly farming?

Conserving the Birds of Uganda’s Banana-Coffee Arc: Land Sparing and Land Sharing Compared

Reconciling the aims of feeding an ever more demanding human population and conserving biodiversity is a difficult challenge. Here, we explore potential solutions by assessing whether land sparing (farming for high yield, potentially enabling the protection of non-farmland habitat), land sharing (lower yielding farming with more biodiversity within farmland) or a mixed strategy would result in ...

Using optimization methods to align food production and biodiversity conservation beyond land sharing and land sparing.

Aligning food production with biodiversity conservation is one of the greatest challenges of our time. One framing of this challenge is the land-sharing vs. land-sparing debate. Much empirical research has focused on identifying the relationship between agricultural yields and species populations, and using the relative number of species with particular relationships to inform landscape-level m...