Agricultural land expansion and intensification, driven by human consumption of agricultural goods, are among the major threats to environmental degradation and biodiversity conservation. Land degradation can ultimately hamper agricultural production through a decrease in ecosystem services. Thus, designing viable land use strategies is a key sustainability challenge. We develop a model describing the coupled dynamics of human demography and landscape composition, while imposing a trade-off between agricultural expansion and intensification. We model land use strategies spanning from low-intensity agriculture and high land conversion rates per person to high-intensity agriculture and low land conversion rates per person; and explore their consequences on the long-term dynamics of the coupled human-land system. We seek to characterise the strategies’ viability in the long run; and understand the mechanisms that potentially lead to large-scale land degradation and population collapse due to resource scarcity. We show that the viability of land use strategies strongly depends on the land’s intrinsic recovery rate. We also find that socio-ecological collapses occur when agricultural intensification is not accompanied by a sufficient decrease in land conversion. Based on these findings we stress the dangers of naive land use planning and the importance of precautionary behaviour for land use management.
Steady increases in human population size and resource consumption are driving rampant agricultural expansion and intensification. Habitat loss caused by agriculture puts the integrity of ecosystems at risk and threatens the persistence of human societies that rely on ecosystem services. We develop a spatially explicit model describing the coupled dynamics of an agricultural landscape and human population size to assess the effect of different land‐use management strategies, defined by agricultural clustering and intensification, on the sustainability of the social‐ecological system. We show how agricultural expansion can cause natural habitats to undergo a percolation transition leading to abrupt habitat fragmentation that feedbacks on human's decision making, aggravating landscape degradation. We found that agricultural intensification to spare land from conversion is a successful strategy only in highly natural landscapes, and that clustering agricultural land is the most effective measure to preserve large connected natural fragments, prevent severe fragmentation and thus, enhance sustainability.
Steady increases in human population size and resource consumption are driving rampant agricultural expansion and intensification. Habitat loss caused by agriculture puts the integrity of ecosystems at risk, and threatens the persistence of human societies that rely on ecosystem services. We develop a spatially explicit model describing the coupled dynamics of an agricultural landscape and human population size to study the effect of different land-use management strategies, defined by agricultural clustering and intensification, on the sustainability of the social-ecological system. We show how agricultural expansion can cause natural habitat to undergo a percolation transition leading to abrupt habitat fragmentation that feedbacks on human's decision making, aggravating landscape degradation. We found that agricultural intensification to spare land from conversion is a successful strategy only in highly natural landscapes, and that clustering agricultural land is the most effective measure to preserve large connected natural fragments, avoid severe fragmentation, and thus, enhance sustainability.
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