Collaboration with Forest Research, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and University of Glasgow.
How can we conserve biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides in the face of growing demand for food and limited funds for conservation? This inter-disciplinary project combines ecology and economics to evaluate the costs and benefits of two key approaches to conservation in farmed landscapes: land sparing and land sharing. We will quantify the biodiversity consequences and economic costs of these competing landscape-scale conservation strategies whilst accounting for the negative spillover effects imposed by past and present farming on non-farmed habitats. We will identify cost-effective conservation strategies, and quantify how these change according to biodiversity priorities and landscape history