Some of my colleagues from Lund and I just published a new paper in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution on what we call multiple scale sparing to widen the, often heated, debate on land sharing versus land sparing1
There is an ongoing debate on whether we should devote specific areas of non-crop habitats to conservation, segregated from high-yielding farmland, “land sparing”, or implement farming practices that integrate biodiversity and promote other services than crop yield “land sharing”. In our paper we argue that the debate over the relative merits of land sparing and land sharing is confused because the spatial scales to apply the land sparing or sharing differ widely in the debate. There might not be a single correct spatial scale for segregating biodiversity protection and commodity production in multifunctional landscapes.
In the article we discuss how this way of thinking on land sparing/sharing may overcome the apparent dichotomy between land sharing and land sparing. Hopefully, it can aid in finding acceptable compromises that conserve biodiversity and landscape multifunctionality.
Read more here:
Georg Andersson 