![]() ![]() But in addition to that, I'm always surprised by how important 'how' you manage a farm is for biodiversity." ![]() The forests are key-we need them, of course. Over time, Hendershot said, "I have moved away from the 'fortress conservation' model, which focused more on creating protected areas separate from human activities, and see more and more how much potential there is outside of forests. In this case, not only are diversified farms themselves providing habitat, they connect otherwise fragmented forested areas. "People, including scientists, had the idea that farmland would not support a meaningful amount of biodiversity," said Daily. Working landscapes are crucial now for preserving biodiversity and its benefits. It has become increasingly apparent around the world that while protected areas remain critical, they are too few and far between to provide the ecosystem services people and nature need to thrive. ![]() "This is a recent assumption that is being overturned," she said. And we need to start building flood protection, water purification, carbon storage, and many other vital benefits back into agricultural landscapes, way beyond what can be achieved in protected areas alone."ĭaily also noted that, in terms of food production, diversified farms are not necessarily lower yielding than intensive agriculture. "We need a constant stream of birds, bats, and other wildlife to help control pests: they suppress the vast majority naturally. About three-quarters of the world's crops require pollinators to some extent, and that 75% is our most nutritious food-think of all the vitamins and minerals packed into fruits, nuts, and veggies," explained Gretchen Daily, faculty director of NatCap and CCB, Bing Professor of Environmental Science in H&S, and a senior author on the paper. "We need a constant stream of pollinators servicing farms. These species are not interchangeable," said Hendershot. "Identity does seem to matter a lot for pest control and other ecosystem services birds provide. In this case, that means having a variety of types of birds feeding on insects and helping to pollinate crops. While this research implies that diversified farming could be key for biodiversity, the relationship goes both ways: biodiversity is key for food security. This paper really documents this pattern," said Hendershot, a postdoctoral fellow at the time of this research in Stanford's Department of Biology in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S), the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology (CCB), and the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap). And the birds we're seeing today aren't the same as we saw 18 to 20 years ago. "Birds are kind of a proxy we use to track the health of ecosystems. But on diversified farms, a significant subset of bird species typically found in forests, including some of conservation concern, actually increased over time. The steepest declines were found in forests, then in intensive agriculture (and the species succeeding in intensive agriculture were often invasive). 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nicholas Hendershot and colleagues compared trends in specific bird populations across three landscape types in Costa Rica: forests, diversified farms, and intensive agriculture.
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