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Biodiversity consequences of cropland abandonment

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 1596–1607 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although cropland expansion continues in many regions, substantial areas of cropland have been abandoned in recent decades as a result of demographic, socioeconomic and technological changes. Variation among species and habitats and limited information on the nature and duration of abandonment have resulted in controversy over how abandonment affects biodiversity. Here, we use annual land-cover maps to estimate habitat changes for 1,322 bird and mammal species at 11 sites across four continents for 1987–2017. We find that most bird (62.7%) and mammal species (77.7%) gain habitat because of cropland abandonment, yet even more would have benefited (74.2% and 86.3%, respectively) if recultivation had not occurred. Furthermore, many birds (32.2%) and mammals (27.8%) experienced net habitat loss after accounting for agricultural conversion that occurred before or alongside abandonment. While cropland abandonment represents an important conservation opportunity, limiting recultivation and reducing additional habitat loss are essential if abandonment is to contribute to biodiversity conservation.

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Fig. 1: Site locations and a representative example of AOH trends following cropland abandonment at one of our 11 study sites.
Fig. 2: Species’ responses to cropland abandonment shown as the proportion of bird and mammal species with various trends in AOH.
Fig. 3: The number of bird and mammal species with various trends in AOH across our 11 study sites from 1987 to 2017.
Fig. 4: An illustration of the pixels included in each of our three AOH calculations.

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Data availability

The annual land-cover maps18 and abandonment maps19 that were the foundation for our analysis are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5348287 (ref. 68). Derived data products supporting this analysis are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13766321 (ref. 69). Bird and mammal range maps are available on request from BirdLife International (http://datazone.birdlife.org/species/requestdis) and IUCN (https://www.iucnredlist.org/resources/spatial-data-download), respectively. Species assessment data (including habitat and elevation preferences) are freely available from IUCN (https://www.iucnredlist.org/). The 2015 global map of IUCN habitat types developed by ref. 51 is freely available via Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/record/4058819 (ref. 70). Elevation data are freely available at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/catalog/USGS_SRTMGL1_003.

Code availability

Code to replicate these analyses is freely available via GitHub (https://github.com/chriscra/biodiversity_abandonment) and is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13777205 (ref. 71).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the following researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who generously shared the land-cover maps that made our analysis possible: A. Brandão, J. Buchner, D. Helmers, B. G. Iuliano, N. E. Kimambo, K. E. Lewińska, E. Razenkova, A. Rizayeva, N. Rogova, S. A. Spawn-Lee and Y. Xie. We thank the Drongos research group for advice and companionship. We thank T. Bearpark and U. Srinivasan for invaluable statistical advice and D. Liang for advice on our traits analysis. Our analysis would not be possible without the dedication of the IUCN, BirdLife International and numerous individual experts who contributed to species assessments. We thank the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for licensing the photos in Fig. 1. Analyses were performed using Princeton Research Computing resources at Princeton University. This research was supported by the High Meadows Foundation (D.S.W.) and the NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change Program (grant no. 80NSSC18K0343 to V.C.R. and H.Y.) and contributes to the Global Land Programme (https://glp.earth/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Christopher L. Crawford & David S. Wilcove

  2. Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    R. Alex Wiebe & David S. Wilcove

  3. Department of Geography, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    He Yin

  4. SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin—Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Volker C. Radeloff

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Contributions

C.L.C. curated data and designed and conducted data analysis, with feedback from R.A.W., H.Y., V.C.R. and D.S.W. C.L.C. cleaned species data, with assistance from R.A.W. in classifying Neotropical bird species. C.L.C. produced figures and wrote the initial draft, with all authors contributing to subsequent revisions.

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Correspondence to Christopher L. Crawford.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Naoki Katayama, Jose Rey-Benayas and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Methods, Results, Discussion, Tables 1–10, Figs. 1–54 and references.

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Crawford, C.L., Wiebe, R.A., Yin, H. et al. Biodiversity consequences of cropland abandonment. Nat Sustain 7, 1596–1607 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01452-1

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