Precision Conservation to Enhance Wildlife Benefits in Agricultural Landscapes

Abstract

Agriculture is the world's largest industry, continues to dominate human land use, and will become more intensive to meet global food demands associated with population growth. Sustainability of global agricultural systems will require strategic integration of conservation practices to protect ecosystems services, health, and productivity. Natural communities as a component of agricultural landscapes support wildlife populations that provide essential ecosystem services with broad societal value. However, allocation of land to noncrop uses entails economic opportunity costs to producers. Effective conservation delivery is dependent on being able to quantify and visualize both the expected costs and benefits. We argue that by identifying economic opportunities for conservation enrollment, increased adoption by landowners is achievable. Our primary goal was to illustrate the necessity, technology, and application of precision conservation in a wildlife management framework. The tools, technologies, and processes associated with precision agriculture can be adapted to inform conservation practice adoption when wildlife objectives are explicitly incorporated into farm-and landscape-level decision framework. We illustrate strategic, objective-driven conservation planning and delivery with case studies from an intensive agricultural landscape in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. A griculture is the world's largest industry and continues to dominate human land use (Robertson and Swinton, 2005). With the human population expected to reach 9.4 billion and per capita arable land expected to be reduced by nearly 40% by 2050 (Lal, 2000), intensification of agricultural production is expected. The mechanism of increase will involve either allocation of additional land to production or maximization of the potential (i.e., increase yield) of land already in use. Considering most of the world's arable land is already in agricultural production (Baligar et al., 2001), future production demands will likely come from land currently in use. Precision agriculture provides a method for implementing the latter

Private lands conservation: A vision for the future

“…Addressing these hindrances requires proactive approaches to simplify conservation opportunities and illustrate economic opportunities of conservation decisions. Research aimed at addressing these hindrances is limited (Huang , McConnell and Burger , Davis et al ). However, to facilitate increased engagement between private landowners and natural resource managers and increase conservation adoption on private lands, continued focus on integrating conservation and economic opportunities will be needed.…”

“…However, to facilitate increased engagement between private landowners and natural resource managers and increase conservation adoption on private lands, continued focus on integrating conservation and economic opportunities will be needed. McConnell and Burger (2011, ) outline approaches and tools to simultaneously identify spatially explicit programmatic‐eligibility opportunities and understand economic tradeoffs in conservation adoption in agricultural systems. Similarly, for forested systems, Huang () and Davis et al () illustrate how growth and yield models can be used to help landowners understand economic tradeoffs between managing pine plantations for maximum timber production versus wildlife habitat, thus informing management decisions.…”

“…Similarly, for forested systems, Huang () and Davis et al () illustrate how growth and yield models can be used to help landowners understand economic tradeoffs between managing pine plantations for maximum timber production versus wildlife habitat, thus informing management decisions. However, despite the robustness of these approaches, neither the methods of McConnell and Burger () nor those of Davis et al () are routinely applied at operational scales in conservation delivery.…”

“…The emerging field of precision conservation provides a framework for strategic design of multifunctional landscapes (Berry et al , Kitchen et al ). Advances in geospatial technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to rapidly and cost‐effectively characterize programmatic eligibility, spatially explicit yield, profitability (McConnell and Burger , ), and critical areas within watersheds that have disproportionate effects on sediment and nutrient loss and water quality (Galzki et al ). These tools, when coupled with spatially explicit regional conservation design such as that produced by landscape conservation cooperatives, joint ventures, and national conservation initiatives (Sage Grouse Initiative, Northern Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, North American Waterfowl Plan) should inform conservation delivery by focusing technical assistance activities in locations where both opportunities and needs are greatest.…”

Bridging the gap between conservation delivery and economics with precision agriculture

“…In agricultural landscapes, sufficient wildlife habitat often comes in the form of remnant natural plant communities that also provide ecosystem services. Therefore, managing for viable sustainable wildlife populations is congruent with ecosystem service management and will require innovative solutions to integrate production agricultural systems (McConnell and Burger ). Agricultural landscapes are dynamic, thus require dynamic solutions to combat negative externalities of production while simultaneously addressing conservation priorities.…”