To all editors, reviewers and authors: time to move on regarding land sparing

By Joern Fischer

Synopsis of this blog post: We don’t need sparing or sharing but both; and how exactly this should happen in any given landscape requires a (more holistic) interdisciplinary approach to be answered. Editors, reviewers and authors should recognize this and prioritise work that goes substantially beyond trading off sparing vs. sharing.

It’s no great secret that I’m not the biggest fan of the framework on land sparing and land sharing – though I do recognize that it does have an academic value, and it is an internally consistent, elegant framework. Those who know how to use this framework carefully do good science with it. But most users over-interpret it, which I find increasingly upsetting. So this blog post is a call to editors, reviewers and authors to be more critical about fundamental assumptions that are regularly being made by many authors, but hardly ever spelt out, or…