A framework for designing multi-objective landscapes for conservation

Abstract

Designing landscapes to accommodate both humans and nature poses huge challenges but is increasingly recognised as an essential component of conservation and land management. The land-sparing land-sharing approach has been proposed as a tool to address this challenge. However, its focus on an ideal landscape configuration leaves a gap on what step-wise management decisions are needed to transform the existing landscape to reach that ideal endpoint. We provide a new conceptual framework amenable to the application of structured decision-making to identify the step-wise pathways between the present landscape and a desired landscape given a defined objective and fixed budget. The model can be parameterised for specific systems using information about: the current state of the landscape, the rates of change between landscape states, and the cost and effectiveness of taking actions. To demonstrate this, we apply it to three different landscape types and find that investment into one of three management actions (varying degrees of management and restoration) can move the system towards more biodiversity or more managed land depending on the objectives of the stakeholders. The dynamic and flexible nature of the framework makes it useful for decision-making in a land sparing land sharing context.