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Shaping land use change and ecosystem restoration in a water-stressed agricultural landscape to achieve multiple benefits

Benjamin P. Bryant, T R. Kelsey, Adrian L. Vogl, Stacey A. Wolny, Duncan J. MacEwan, Paul C. Selmants, Tanushree Biswas, H S. Butterfield

Irrigated agriculture has grown rapidly over the last 50 years, helping food production keep pace with population growth, but also leading to significant habitat and biodiversity loss globally. Now, in some regions, land degradation and overtaxed water resources mean historical production levels may need to be reduced. In this study, the authors demonstrate how spatial planning for habitat restoration in stressed agricultural landscapes can recover biodiversity and create co-benefits during transitions to sustainability. They applied their approach to California’s San Joaquin Valley where groundwater regulations are driving significant land use change. In order to understand what a plausible future landscapes will look like with reductions in groundwater use, they link agricultural-economic and land use change models to predict future cropping patterns, including temporary fallowing and permanent retirement. The authors found that a large fraction of the reduced cultivation may be met through temporary fallowing, but still estimate that over 200,000 acres of agricultural land will need to be permanently retired. They then applied systematic conservation planning to identify optimized restoration solutions that secure at least 25,000 acres of high quality habitat for each of five endangered species, accounting for spatially varying opportunity costs specific to each future landscape. The authors identified consolidated areas that are common to all land use scenarios where restoration could be targeted to enhance habitat by utilizing land likely to be retired anyway, and by shifting some retirement from regions with low habitat value to regions with high habitat value. They also show that there are significant potential co-benefits of retirement derived from avoided nitrogen loadings and soil carbon sequestration.

See Q&A about this paper on Stanford's Water in the West webpage.