Cropland expansion in the United States produces marginal yields at high costs to wildlife

Abstract

Recent expansion of croplands in the United States has caused widespread conversion of grasslands and other ecosystems with largely unknown consequences for agricultural production and the environment. Here we assess annual land use change 2008–16 and its impacts on crop yields and wildlife habitat. We find that croplands have expanded at a rate of over one million acres per year, and that 69.5% of new cropland areas produced yields below the national average, with a mean yield deficit of 6.5%. Observed conversion infringed upon high-quality habitat that, relative to unconverted land, had provided over three times higher milkweed stem densities in the Monarch butterfly Midwest summer breeding range and 37% more nesting opportunities per acre for waterfowl in the Prairie Pothole Region of the Northern Great Plains. Our findings demonstrate a pervasive pattern of encroachment into areas that are increasingly marginal for production, but highly significant for wildlife, and suggest that such tradeoffs may be further amplified by future cropland expansion.

Rising farm costs, marginal land cropping, and ecosystem service markets

“…However, our results clearly show the opposite outcome for Canada (Fig. 2A), in line with reports from elsewhere including the United States in recent years 5,22,44 . We do observe rising production and falling prices, but these trends are associated with more land use, not less (Fig.…”

“…In other words, yield increases on the most productive land should serve as the driving force behind the retirement of marginal lands. However, in many cases the opposite has happened 6,21 , with farmed land increasing by 21% globally since the 1970's despite yield increases, extensive land retirement programs in some countries, and often declining commodity prices 5,22,23 . Synthetic fertilizer and pesticide application have also increased despite evidence of biophysical yield thresholds in response to factors including drought 10,23−25 , linkages with ground water pollution 4,26,27 and biodiversity declines 28,29 .…”

Downtown Diet: a global meta-analysis of urbanization on consumption patterns of vertebrate predators

“…Moreover, this overlap in HFI between rural and urban sites demonstrates that "rural" does not equate to "natural" or habitats devoid of anthropogenic perturbations. Rural areas encompass agricultural production such as crops and livestock, each known to alter vegetation and animal communities (Gordon, 2018;Lark et al, 2020). Historically, "urban-rural" comparative studies have framed these categorizations as dichotomous spaces and carried an implicit assumption about the relatively intact character of "rural" areas, which is not necessarily consistent at large spatial and temporal scales (Moll et al, 2019).…”

Accuracy, Bias, and Improvements in Mapping Crops and Cropland across the United States Using the USDA Cropland Data Layer

“…These estimates are based on a comparison with parcel level data from the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) [27] and another land cover map, the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) [28,29]. While these comparisons provide insights into the accuracy of the CDL for a given state and year, applications of the CDL product typically extend well beyond this scope; many analyses utilize modifications of the original CDL datasets, compare across the state products, and/or estimate changes in LULC over time [30][31][32][33][34]. Despite the prevalence of these applications, the performance of the CDLs in many of these extensions has not been evaluated.…”