Data from: Land sparing to make space for species dependent on natural habitats and High Nature Value farmland

Empirical evidence from four continents indicates that human food demand
may be best reconciled with biodiversity conservation through sparing
natural habitats by boosting agricultural yields. This runs counter to the
conservation paradigm of wildlife-friendly farming which is influential in
Europe, where many species are dependent on low-yielding High Nature Value
farmland threatened by both intensification and abandonment. In the first
multi-taxon population-level test of land-sparing theory in Europe, we
quantified how population densities of 175 bird and sedge species varied
with farm yield across 26 1-km squares in eastern Poland. We discovered
that, as in previous studies elsewhere, simple land sparing, with only
natural habitats on spared land, markedly out-performed land sharing in
its effect on region-wide projected population sizes. However, a novel
“three-compartment” land-sparing approach, in which about one-third of
spared land is assigned to very low-yield agriculture and the remainder to
natural habitats, resulted in least-reduced projected future populations
for more species. Implementing the three-compartment model would require
significant reorganisation of current subsidy regimes, but would mean
high-yield farming could release sufficient land for species dependent on
both natural and High Nature Value farmland to persist.