Implementation of the land-sharing and land-sparing framework in agro-ecological corridors

Maintaining adequate food supply while conserving biodiversity is one of the great challenges in conservation today. There is a fundamental controversy between land sparing and land sharing[1]: Land sparing favors intensive agriculture that allows maximal food production in a small area and spares land for conservation, while land sharing favors agro-environmental practices that create multifunctional agroecosystems. While land sparing has proven more advantageous in intact forests, evidence from long-history agricultural landscapes is mixed[2]. Using the sparing-sharing framework, we assessed costs and benefits of agriculture and conservation in planning an ecological corridor in the Jezre…