Precision Conservation to Enhance Wildlife Benefits in Agricultural Landscapes

Agriculture is the world’s largest industry, continues to dominate human land use, and will become more intensive to meet global food demands associated with population growth. Sustainability of global agricultural systems will require strategic integration of conservation practices to protect ecosystems services, health, and productivity. Natural communities as a component of agricultural landscapes support wildlife populations that provide essential ecosystem services with broad societal value. However, allocation of land to noncrop uses entails economic opportunity costs to producers. Effective conservation delivery is dependent on being able to quantify and visualize both the expected costs and benefits. We argue that by identifying economic opportunities for conservation enrollment, increased adoption by landowners is achievable. Our primary goal was to illustrate the necessity, technology, and application of precision conservation in a wildlife management framework. The tools, technologies, and processes associated with precision agriculture can be adapted to inform conservation practice adoption when wildlife objectives are explicitly incorporated into farmand landscape-level decision framework. We illustrate strategic, objective-driven conservation planning and delivery with case studies from an intensive agricultural landscape in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry and continues to dominate human land use (Robertson and Swinton, 2005). With the human population expected to reach 9.4 billion and per capita arable land expected to be reduced by nearly 40% by 2050 (Lal, 2000), intensification of agricultural production is expected. The mechanism of increase will involve either allocation of additional land to production or maximization of the potential (i.e., increase yield) of land already in use. Considering most of the world’s arable land is already in agricultural production (Baligar et al., 2001), future production demands will likely come from land currently in use. Precision agriculture provides a method for implementing the latter Abbreviations: CRP, Conservation Reserve Program; DST, decision support tool; WRP, Wetland Reserve Program. M.D. McConnell, Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources, Univ. of Georgia, 180 E. Green St., Athens, GA 30602-2152. L.W. Burger, Jr., Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station, 211F Bost Center, 190 Bost Extension Drive, Mississippi State, MS 39762-9740 ([email protected]). *Corresponding author ([email protected]). doi:10.2134/agronmonogr59.2013.0031 © ASA, CSSA, and SSSA, 5585 Guilford Road, Madison, WI 53711, USA. Precision Conservation: Geospatial Techniques for Agricultural and Natural Resources Conservation J. Delgado, G. Sassenrath, and T. Mueller, editors. Agronomy Monograph 59. Published December 1, 2016