Trade-offs between biodiversity and agriculture are moving targets in dynamic landscapes

Understanding how biodiversity responds to intensifying agriculture is critical to mitigating the trade-offs between them. These trade-offs are particularly strong in tropical and subtropical deforestation frontiers, yet it remains unclear how changing landscape context in such frontiers alters agriculture-biodiversity trade-offs.
We focus on the Argentinean Chaco, a global deforestation hotspot, to explore how landscape context shapes trade-off curves between agricultural intensity and avian biodiversity. We use a space-for-time approach and integrate a large field dataset of bird communities (197 species, 234 survey plots), three agricultural intensity metrics (meat yield, energy yield and profit), and a range of environmental covariates in a hierarchical Bayesian occupancy framework.
Woodland extent in the landscape consistently determines how individual bird species, and the bird community as a whole, respond to agricultural intensity. Many species switch in their fundamental...