Minimizing trade-offs in agricultural landscapes through optimal spatial allocation of agri-environmental practices

The implementation of agri-environmental practices (AEPs) is a key strategy to reach biodiversity and environmental objectives in agricultural landscapes, but their widespread application is often hampered by perceived trade-offs with crop production. However, the extent of these trade-offs remains poorly understood and has rarely been quantified in real-world case studies. Hence, our aim was to analyze trade-offs between crop yield, water quality and farmland biodiversity using an optimization approach for the spatial allocation of AEPs for a catchment in Eastern Germany. Potential AEPs were selected based on a co design approach with local stakeholders (stakeholder-based scenario) and were complemented by additional AEPs to reach current EU policies targets (policy-based scenarios). Consequences for crop production and environmental objectives were evaluated through spatially-explicit crop, water and biodiversity models. Contrary to common perception, we found that crop losses required to increase environmental objectives were marginal (maximum loss of 1.1% in the stakeholder based scenario). The implementation of AEPs even led to win-win outcomes for crop production and environmental objectives in over 20% of the Pareto-optimal solutions as compared to the status quo. These win-win outcomes resulted merely from biophysical effects as positive biodiversity feedbacks to agriculture were not included in our model. Spatial optimization of AEPs allocation was key to mediating trade-offs across scenarios, highlighting the large potential of spatially explicit approaches for the management of agricultural landscapes.