A dynamical model to study the effect of landscape agricultural management on the conservation of native ecological networks

Food production and biodiversity conservation are commonly seen as separate pursuits with contradicting implications. This view is based on a conception of agriculture as a necessarily destructive activity for the ecosystems, failing to recognize the qualitative differences among diverse types of agricultural management. We built a dynamical and spatially explicit model to test the way in which virtual ecological networks decrease in diversity as the type of agricultural activities that surround them become less and less permeable to wild species. We find that biodiversity exhibits a robust pattern of slow decrease as the agricultural activities diminish in permeability or quality.