Evaluating spatially explicit sharing-sparing scenarios for multiple environmental outcomes

1. Understanding how to allocate land for the sustainable delivery of multiple, competing objectives is a major societal challenge. The land sharing-sparing framework presents a heuristic for understanding the trade-off between food production and biodiversity conservation by comparing region-wide land use scenarios which are equivalent in terms of overall food production.

2. Here, for two contrasting regions of lowland England (The Fens and Salisbury Plain), we use empirical data and predictive models to compare a suite of spatially explicit scenarios reflecting the full range of the sharing-sparing continuum, including mixed scenarios which combine elements of both sharing and sparing. We evaluate a range of outcomes (bird populations, global warming potential (GWP), nitrogen and phosphorus pollution and outdoor recreation), in order to identify approaches to regional land use planning with the potential to deliver multiple societal benefits.

3. Land-sharing scenarios (which red...