Abstract
Biodiversity is severely declining in intensively managed agriculture worldwide. In response, land-management strategies for biodiversity conservation on farmland are in debate, namely ecological intensification and land sparing vs. land sharing. In parallel, there is a recent food vs. energy debate stimulated by an increasing competition for land resources. Despite clear overlaps between these two debates, they were rarely connected in previous research. This paper aims to stimulate a discussion by providing a contextual link between biodiversity conservation strategies and options for future energy crop deployment. Therefore, nine conceptual land-use scenarios are developed, and then, the potential biodiversity implications are discussed based on the findings from past and ongoing research. These scenarios include the integration and segregation of both food and energy crops on lands with a range of productivity and suitability for agricultural production. We assume that the clear segregation between food crops on productive land and energy crops on marginal land is less likely to be a solution of mitigating the problems related to the biodiversity decline, especially in the European agricultural landscape context. In contrast, the integration of food and energy crop production systems at the farm to landscape scale has greater potential for ecological intensification, although conflicts with traditional nature conservation targets may arise. We conclude that broadening the perspectives of biodiversity conservation in agriculture is crucial, and the inclusion of energy crop production into the recent debates on biodiversity conservation strategies is helpful.
Highlights
A decrease in available arable land per capita due to a rapid population growth [1], a growing number of animals in agriculture that need to be fed and actions for climate change mitigation and adaptation [2, 3] are aggravating the competition for land resources
Past research on bioenergy expansion mainly focused on markets and feedstock distribution [9, 10] or bioenergy potentials and land availability on national and global scales (e.g. [11,12,13])
Studies looking into the impacts of bioenergy production on biodiversity and/or ecosystem services were mainly undertaken from national or global perspectives (e.g. [14, 15])
Summary
A decrease in available arable land per capita due to a rapid population growth [1], a growing number of animals in agriculture that need to be fed and actions for climate change mitigation and adaptation [2, 3] are aggravating the competition for land resources. B3: Strips of dedicated energy crops on economically marginal land In comparison to B2, the focus of this scenario is on the introduction of woody perennial crops integrated as agroforestry systems into existing annual or perennial land use An example for this is the cultivation of southern mallee eucalypts in the extensive dryland wheat and sheep regions of southern Australia where they were introduced to remedy a range of natural resource management problems [61]. Discussion of potential impacts of the application of suggested scenarios based on current studies By comparing scenarios of segregated and integrated food and energy cropping at coarse spatial scales with yield-biodiversity relationships across land productivity classes (Fig. 1), we could explore possible risks and opportunities for biodiversity conservation across different bioenergy deployment strategies.
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