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Abstract
It is argued that landscape-scale management (LSM) of habitat is better than farmscale
management (FSM) when considering the externality of ecosystem services.
Given this advantage, how to regulate individual farmers’ land-use decisions to
achieve the LSM solution is an issue of common concern both for farmers and
policymakers. Specifically, it needs to be determined if there exists a dominant landuse
pattern that characterizes the LSM solution compared to FSM solution. In
addition to the area of habitat, we design a land-use pattern index (LPI) to
characterize the configuration of habitat and project it onto the sharing-sparing
continuum. We find that the LSM solution is characterized by less intensive farming,
and configurations of habitat are closer to land sharing. However, as crop
dependency on ecosystem-services declines, the land-use patterns with LSM and FSM
converge and the configurations of habitat start to resemble to land sparing. In
addition, when habitat quality improves the configurations of habitat on the border
farms become important. Finally, the less mobile service-providers are, the more
farmers should focus on land-use patterns on their own farms. Our indices of land-use
patterns could be integrated into the cross-compliance of CAP (Common Agricultural
Policy) to better manage ecosystem-service in the future.