Agricultural land expansion and intensification, driven by population's consumption of agricultural goods, are among the major threats to environmental degradation and biodiversity conservation. Through a decrease of ecosystem service provision, land degradation can ultimately hamper agricultural production, thus restraining humans' access to resources. Hence, designing viable land use strategies is a key sustainability challenge. We develop a model describing the coupled dynamics of human demography and landscape composition and impose a trade-off between agricultural expansion and intensification. We model land use strategies spanning from low intensity agriculture and high land conversion rates per person, to high intensity agriculture and low land conversion rates per person. We then explore the effect of different land use strategies on the coupled human-land system. Specifically, we look to characterize their viability in the long run, and understand the mechanisms that potentially lead to large scale land degradation and population decline due to resource scarcity.
Results/Conclusions
We stress the importance of the land’s recovery capacity to determine sustainable land use strategies. When the recovery rate of degraded land is low, intermediate strategies in the spectrum lead to severe landscape degradation followed by population collapse. The range over which land use strategies are not sustainable is highly sensitive to small changes in the land’s recovery capacity. We put this result in the context of land use planning to show the risks of knowledge gaps in informed management. We show how uncertainty on the land's recovery capacity increases the likelihood of adopting non-viable land use strategies when management practices seek to maximize agricultural production. Based on this we stress the importance of precautionary behavior for land use planning.