Supplemental readings from moderator/discussant Jeannine Cavender-Bares, Univ of Minnesota

Polasky et al 2008. Where to put things? Spatial land management to sustain biodiversity and economic returns. Biological Conservation.

**Expanding human population and economic growth have led to large-scale conversion of natural habitat to human-dominated landscapes with consequent large-scale declines in biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity, while at the same time meeting expanding human needs, is an issue of utmost importance. In this paper the authors develop a spatially explicit landscape- level model for analyzing the biological and economic consequences of alternative land-use patterns. The spatially explicit biological model incorporates habitat preferences, area requirements and dispersal ability between habitat patches for terrestrial vertebrate species to predict the likely number of species that will be sustained on the landscape. The study demonstrates that actual land-use practices often fall very short of the "efficiency frontier" - the optimality curve where combined biodiversity and economic benefits would be maximized. In other words, there are number of options to BOTH preserve more species and provide greater economic benefits from land-use than the status quo. Consideration of where convergent and divergent development scenarios fall within the trade-off space between providing for human well being and sustaining life support systems, and how far they are from the "efficiency frontier" is critical for decision making.

Perfecto & Vandermeer 2008, Biodiversity Conservation in Tropical Agroecosystems: A New Conservation Paradigm

The paper is a literature review on biodiversity in tropical agricultural landscapes concluding that many tropical agricultural systems have high levels of biodiversity and provide a high-quality matrix for movement of forest organisms among patches of natural vegetation. The authors argue that the conservation paradigm that focuses on setting aside pristine forests while ignoring the agricultural landscape is a failed strategy in light of ecological principles, particularly the patch dynamics involved in metacommunities.

Nature's Matrix, Chapters 1 and 2

An excerpt from Nature's Matrix (2009) by Perfecto, Vandermeer and Wright. Chapter 2 is most relevant to the seminar, but Chapter 1 provides an overview (both are included). The authors lay out the nature of trade-offs between conservation of biodiversity, on the one hand, and food production for human welfare, on the other, from an ecological perspective grounded in metacommunity (patch dynamics) theory.