Food production and biodiversity are not incompatible in temperate heterogeneous agricultural landscapes Provisionally Accepted
Silvia Zingg
Jean-Yves Humbert- 1Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
- 2University of Bern, Switzerland
We need landscape-scale approaches to design and manage agro-ecosystems that can sustain both agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. In this study, yield figures provided by 299 farmers served to quantify the energy-equivalents of food production across different crops in 49 1km 2 landscapes. Our results show that the relationship between bird diversity and food energy production depends on the proportion of farmland within the landscape, with a negative correlation observed in agriculture dominated landscapes (≥ 64-74% farmland). In contrast, neither typical farmland birds nor butterflies showed any significant relationship with total food energy production. We conclude that in European temperate regions consisting of small-scale, mixed farming systems (arable and livestock production), productivity and biodiversity conservation may not be purely antagonistic, particularly when (semi-)natural habitats make up a large fraction of the landscape (≥ 20%).
Keywords: sustainable agriculture, Birds, Butterflies, Farmland, landscape scale, conservation
Received: 27 Jan 2024;
Accepted: 13 May 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Zingg, Grenz and Humbert. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dr. Jean-Yves Humbert, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland