Land-sparing and land-sharing provide complementary benefits for conserving avian biodiversity in coffee-growing landscapes

Protecting biodiversity while sustaining agricultural production is one of our greatest modern challenges. The dominant conservation paradigm in tropical coffee-growing regions involves land-sharing, wherein wildlife-friendly shade trees are integrated into plantations. Meanwhile, the value of land-sparing approaches that combine intensified farming with forest preservation has not been fully explored. We surveyed bird communities in forests and coffee plantations in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia and used community occupancy models to quantify the effects of multi-scale habitat characteristics on distributions of 3 species groups (forest specialists, open area specialists, and generalists). We then predicted avian diversity across simulated landscape mosaics of sun coffee, shade coffee, and forest to compare land-sharing, land-sparing, and hybrid conservation approaches. Simulated land-sharing landscapes supported more open area specialists (16–17% of the community) and up to 17 (95% credible interval 11, 24) more generalist species (53–62% of the community) per point than sparing landscapes. Conversely, the richness of forest specialists (21–30% of the community) was greatest in land-sparing and hybrid simulations. Total community richness was greatest in simulated sparing landscapes during the breeding season but in sharing landscapes during the non-breeding season. Our results demonstrate that land-sharing and land-sparing can be complimentary conservation strategies to support functionally diverse and seasonally variable avian communities in coffee-growing regions. We recommend that eco-certification programs incorporate both conservation models to provide (1) habitat for the greatest diversity of species across the annual cycle, and (2) flexible participation options for farmers exposed to heterogeneous markets, growing conditions, and landscape contexts.