Economic and not ecological variables shape the sparing-sharing trade-off in a mixed cropping landscape

1. The framework of land sparing vs. land sharing provides a useful analytical tool to address the crop-production/biodiversity trade-off. Despite multiple case-studies testing the sparing-sharing trade-off, this framework still lacks the ability to identify the conditions in which sparing, or sharing, would be the preferred strategy for pareto-optimizing both food-production and biodiversity. Under some conditions, ecosystem services may create a positive feedback between biodiversity and crop production, affecting the optimization.

2. This study aims to identify the conditions and the relevant variables that determine the preferred land-use strategy in terms of maximizing both biodiversity and food production, while accounting for positive feedback of ecosystem services in this analysis. We used a simulation model with data from a mixed cropping landscape (100 km2) covering seven crop types, five taxonomic groups, three biodiversity metrics and 23 bioindicators to explore the varia...