Thread by @tomfinch89

1 #BOU18TC

Often, conservation competes with food production by promoting less intensive farming and/or unfarmed reserves

Given that food production is essential for human wellbeing, what’s the best way of reconciling this trade-off?

To share, or spare; that is the question

2 #BOU18TC

We compared land sharing and land sparing scenarios (+ intermediate ones) all of which, crucially, produce the *same amount of food* overall.

We also evaluated a ‘three compartment sparing’ scenario (far right) which combines elements of both sharing and sparing

3 #BOU18TC

We used density-yield curves to estimate the regional population size of breeding birds under each scenario.

We fitted these curves separately for breeding birds in 2 regions of southern England: The Fens & Salisbury Plain

#ornithology

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Under a simple vote count, land sparing is the strategy under which most species achieve highest predicted population size, especially among species which are sensitive to farming.

Still, many species do best under land sharing or one of the intermediate strategies.

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Averaged across all species, '3-compartment sparing' does a good job of balancing the needs of different species (i.e. both natural habitat specialists & farmland specialists) whilst maintaining overall food production.

It might look something like this:

6 #BOU18TC

The benefits of habitat restoration outweigh the costs of agricultural intensification (up to a point), so sparing beats sharing.

Sparing is even better if some 'spared' land is managed as low-yield wildlife-friendly farmland.

Plenty of challenges / many thanks

I can't believe I just used pie charts for #datavis