Intensive Farming May be Better for Birds and Wildlife Than Sharing the Land

More intensive farming practice may seem like a bad thing for the environment. Now, though, researchers have found that intensive farming practices may be better for tropical birds.

"I think the most surprising result is that species richness within communities does not explain the loss of phylogenetic diversity under land-sharing," said David Edwards, one of the researchers, in a news release. "So even if farming at low intensity over a larger area retains the number of species present, those species are less evolutionarily distinct and thus preserve less phylogenetic diversity."

The researchers actually examined the question of farming practices in the Choco-Andes of Colombia, a global hotspot for birds. Many species here can't be found anywhere else in the world. In addition, the region has been widely impact by low-intensity farming, which made it the perfect place for this particular study.

The scientists sampled birds in three study areas, each containing contiguous forest and cattle farms. While they found many bird species living within low-intensity farmland communities, those areas showed a loss of more than 650 million years of evolutionary history in comparison to the forest.

The scientists also used landscape simulations to examine the outcomes of land-sharing versus land-sparing practices. They found that land-sharing becomes increasing inferior to land-sparing as the distance from intact forest grows.

So what does this mean? It's been to concentrate farming areas over a smaller area rather than sharing farmland with birds.

The findings reveal that if the goal is to preserve more bird species, then it's better to farm more intensively in some areas while leaving more blocks of land entirely alone.

The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.

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