Habitat connectivity and matrix restoration: the wider implications of agri-environment schemes

Aim
Conservation conflict takes place where food production imposes a cost
on wildlife conservation and vice versa. Where does conservation impose the
maximum cost on production, by opposing the intensification and expansion
of farmland? Where does conservation confer the maximum benefit on wildlife,
by buffering and connecting protected areas with a habitable and permeable
matrix of crop and non-crop habitat? Our aim was to map the costs and bene-
fits of conservation versus production and thus to propose a conceptual frame-
work for systematic conservation planning in agricultural landscapes.
Location World-wide.

Methods
To quantify these costs and benefits, we used a geographic informa-
tion system to sample the cropland of the world and map the proportion of
non-crop habitat surrounding the cropland, the number of threatened verte-
brates with potential to live in or move through the matrix and the yield gap
of the cropland. We defined the potential for different types of conservation
conflict in terms of interactions between habitat and yield (potential for expan-
sion, intensification, both or neither). We used spatial scan statistics to find
‘hotspots’ of conservation conflict.

Results
All of the ‘hottest’ hotspots of conservation conflict were in sub-Saharan
Africa, which could have impacts on sustainable intensification in this region.

Main conclusions
Systematic conservation planning could and should be used
to identify hotspots of conservation conflict in agricultural landscapes, at multi-
ple scales. The debate between ‘land sharing’ (extensive agriculture that is wild-
life friendly) and ‘land sparing’ (intensive agriculture that is less wildlife
friendly but also less extensive) could be resolved if sharing and sparing were
used as different types of tool for resolving different types of conservation con-
flict (buffering and connecting protected areas by maintaining matrix quality,
in different types of matrix). Therefore, both sharing and sparing should be
prioritized in hotspots of conflict, in the context of countryside biogeography.