Abstract
Agricultural expansion, driven by the increasing demand on crops, poses a severe threat to the global environment and to human welfare. Regarded as an effective landscape pattern for balancing biodiversity and food security, land sparing bears high expectations from ecologists. To reflect the spatial-temporal pattern change of land sparing, we calculate a land sparing/sharing (LSS) index on the basis of a remote sensing dataset. The land-sparing pattern has shown an apparent increasing trend globally, especially in hotspots, including the eastern United States, central South America, northern Europe, Kazakhstan, southeastern China, and the Korean Peninsula. Meanwhile, the land-sharing pattern has been increasing in some other regions, including in the southeast of South America, western Europe, central Europe, southern Europe, and northwestern China. However, according to statistical datasets, contrary to the overall increasing trend of land sparing, passive land sparing, incentivized by lower food prices due to increased yields, is decreasing, especially in countries with high levels of development. Our results reveal the global trends in land sparing and passive land sparing, providing support for balancing biodiversity conservation and food security among countries and ecoregions.
Highlights
A constantly growing global population and food demands have led to the expansion of agricultural lands and the loss of wild nature, which is a major threat to biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as human health and well-being [1,2]
The first part is based on remote sensing to identify land sparing at the pixel scale, including Sections 2.1–2.3, while the second part, which is illustrated in Section 2.4, adopts statistics to identify passive land sparing at the national scale
This demonstrates that the current trend of the global land-sparing pattern is faint, and that it has the potential of being changed by effective measures
Summary
A constantly growing global population and food demands have led to the expansion of agricultural lands and the loss of wild nature, which is a major threat to biodiversity, ecosystem services, as well as human health and well-being [1,2]. The land-sharing pattern integrates land for nature and land for agriculture, so as to guarantee a partly win-win situation of biodiversity conservation and crop production, while the land-sparing pattern separates intensively used agricultural land from biodiversity conservation in order to spare more land for nature [5,6,7]. Many studies have conducted comparative analyses on land-sharing and land-sparing patterns, involving multiple aspects, including the food supply, spatial scale, environmental heterogeneity, and biodiversity conservation [6,8,9,10]. The land-sparing pattern has been considered as a possible solution to reducing the negative impacts of agricultural expansion [11], and is more beneficial to species that are sensitive to agriculture or that require a large range of space [12,13].
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