Optimising nature conservation outcomes for a given region-wide level of food production

The land sharing-sparing framework aims to quantify the trade-off between food production and biodiversity conservation, but it has been criticised for offering, for reasons of simplicity, an unrealistically limited set of different land uses. Here, we develop the framework to evaluate a much larger suite of land-use strategies in which the areas and yields of three land-use compartments, natural habitat, high-yield farmland, and lower-yield farmland, are varied simultaneously. For two regions of England, we use functions that relate the local population density of breeding bird species to farm yield to simulate species-specific region-wide population sizes under each strategy. We find that geometric mean population size, averaged across all species, is maximised when farmland yields are higher than the current average yield, and when spared land combines both natural habitat and low-yield farmland. This conclusion is relatively insensitive to the maximum yield considered feasibl...土地共享-节约框架（land sharing-sparing framework）旨在量化粮食生产与生物多样性保护之间的权衡关系，但由于追求简化，该框架所限定的土地利用类型组合过于单一，因此受到了诸多批评。 在此研究中，我们对该框架进行拓展，以评估更多样化的土地利用策略：在这类策略中，自然栖息地、高产农田与低产农田这三类土地利用分区的面积与产量可同时调整。针对英格兰的两个区域，我们采用了将繁殖鸟类种群局部密度与农田产量相关联的函数，以此模拟每种策略下各物种在区域范围内的种群规模。 研究发现，当农田产量高于当前平均水平，且被节约出的土地同时涵盖自然栖息地与低产农田时，所有物种的几何平均种群规模可达最大值。该结论相对不受所考虑的可行最大产量的影响……