Trade-offs between agriculture and biodiversity conservation in the South American Chaco

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Global biodiversity is eroding rapidly, which is of great concern because of the intrinsic value of biodiversity and its importance for human well-being. Land use change has been the main cause of this decline due to habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation. These pressures will amplify further as land-based production will have to increase due to surging demand. Clearly, a central challenge for humankind is how to balance agricultural land use with the conservation of natural ecosystems and biodiversity. Systematic trade-off analyses can identify unrealized potentials for aligning the often conflicting goals of agriculture and conservation, but this requires detailed knowledge on how biodiversity responds to land use change. Such knowledge is, unfortunately, often particularly scarce in those areas where most biodiversity is found and where land use change is rapid and drastic.This project will assess recent land use changes and the trade-offs between agriculture and biodiversity at the regional scale in the Argentine Chaco. Globalization has triggered rampant agricultural expansion and intensification there, but unfortunately neither recent land use changes nor their biodiversity effects are well understood. Making full use of the Landsat image archive, we will derive large-area image composites and use machine-learning change detection algorithms to reconstruct 30 years of land use change for the Argentine Chaco. To assess biodiversity, we will carry out a rapid bird community survey along a gradient of land use intensity to derive a range of diversity metrics. Birds are excellent biodiversity surrogates and can be surveyed relatively easily across large areas in a standardized way. We will then use non-parametric model selection routines based to understand the relationship of land use change and bird diversity indicators, particularly regarding changes in agricultural intensity. Finally, we will use agricultural productivity and bird diversity indicators in a novel optimization approach to systematically assess the trade-offs among agricultural production and biodiversity in order to identify levels of different land uses that would aligning production and conservation goals best in the Chaco.This project will carry out one of the first regional-scale trade-off analyses between biodiversity and agriculture for a highly dynamic region, thereby improving our understanding of how land use affects biodiversity in general. The project will also generate novel insights into how to align the often conflicting goals of agriculture and conservation in the face of globalization. In doing so, the project proposed here will make substantial contributions to the fields of land use science, conservation science, and sustainability science. Our project results will provide guidance for conservation and land use planning seeking to transition to a more sustainable future in the Chaco.