Agricultural development and the conservation of avian biodiversity on the Eurasian steppes: a comparison of land‐sparing and land‐sharing approaches

Abstract

1. The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the abandonment of >40 million ha of cropland, a collapse in livestock numbers and the recovery of depleted biodiversity on the steppe grasslands of Kazakhstan and southern Russia. More recently, large-scale reclamation of abandoned cropland and intensification of agriculture are observed, highlighting a need for strategies to reconcile agricultural development and biodiversity. 2. We related bird densities along a land-use gradient to yield estimates from arable and livestock systems in central Kazakhstan to decide whether a land-sparing, a land-sharing or an intermediate strategy would result in the largest benefits for biodiversity. 3. For 'loser species' (whose population size is reduced by farming), land sparing was predicted to support higher total populations of more species than was land sharing, at all production targets. 'Winners' (species benefitting from agriculture) profited from land sharing when judged from food energy or protein. Intermediate yields were best for very few species. Heavily grazed steppe grassland was important for several globally threatened and biome-restricted species. 4. Government statistics suggested that over 50% of abandoned cropland has been reclaimed since 2000 and crop yields have increased. In the same period, there was significant progress towards the designation of new protected areas, but the total area in Kazakhstan still falls short of the Convention on Biological Diversity's 17% target. 5. Policy implications. Further increases in agricultural production are likely to reduce populations of most birds, especially if they are achieved by conversion of abandoned cropland, or grassland. Our results suggest that production increases would do least harm if they resulted from increasing the output of existing cropland, using approaches such as snow accumulation, no-till and more efficient grain harvesting and storage, rather than from further reclamation of abandoned land that is now reverting back to steppe. Production increases should be offset by improved conservation planning through the designation of protected areas on land potentially suitable for cropland expansion.

What Have We Learned from the Land Sparing-sharing Model?

“…This is true for birds and trees in the Upper Guinea forests of Ghana [2], birds and trees in the Upper Gangetic Plain of India [2], birds in Uganda's banana-coffee arc [3], birds and dung beetles in the Colombian Chocó-Andes [4], birds in the Kazakhstan steppe [5], birds in the Pampas grasslands of Brazil and Uruguay [6], and birds, trees and dung beetles in the Yucatán, Mexico [7]. It is especially true for species with small global ranges, which are often those of most conservation concern.…”

“…The farming systems with most conservation value, such as lightly-grazed semi-natural grasslands, are so low-yielding as to make little meaningful contribution to food supply [5,6]. Although some species peak in density at low or intermediate yields-in high-nature-value farmland, as it is termed in Europe [83]-they do so in farmland with yields too low to maintain current food production if scaled up.…”

“…In a situation where agroecological methods produce a lot of food per hectare and "conventional" methods produce little food per hectare (as assumed by [14]), then agroecological methods will be those with the greatest potential to contribute to a land-sparing strategy. In addition to more conventional inputs, studies using the model have proposed supported knowledge-intensive smallholder farming [2], traditional snow accumulation techniques [5] and silvopastoral systems [7] to increase yields in a land-sparing context.…”

Step(pe) up! Raising the profile of the Palaearctic natural grasslands

“…Agricultural abandonment had positive consequences for particular plants and the vegetation as a whole ; the vegetation of arable land comprised mostly widely distributed weeds. Assuming an increasing demand for food and fibre, land-use strategies to reconcile biodiversity conservation and food production both for Western Siberia ) and for Kazakhstan (Kamp et al 2015) might rather promote a sustainable intensification of existing croplands rather than a new expansion of cropland into currently abandoned areas.…”

Nestling diet optimization and condition in relation to prey attributes and breeding patch size in a patch-resident insectivorous passerine: an optimal continuum and habitat constraints

“…Hitherto, all dietary studies of nestling Whinchats were restricted to different grassland types (reviews in Bastian and Bastian 1996;Suter 1988;Britschgi et al 2006), with hardly any detailed dietary data for Whinchats (and other bird species) breeding in abandoned farmland. Importantly, however, owing to the progressive increase in the acreage of abandoned farmland in some temperate areas of the northern hemisphere (Kamp et al 2015), such knowledge is essential in order to diagnose the biodiversity and viability of bird populations in this habitat (Kamp et al 2015;Tryjanowski et al 2009;Sanderson et al 2013;Plieninger et al 2014;Zakkak et al 2015).…”