Trade-offs and compromises in multifunctional landscapes: simultaneously maintaining high levels of pollinator communities, pollination service, and profit? – A modelling study

Evaluating agri-environmental measures that support both biodiversity and productive agriculture requires bio-economic models capable of estimating trade-offs between economic and ecological functions, including multifunctionality—the simultaneous provision of multiple functions. These models must account for how landscape composition and configuration influence function delivery. For instance, pollination services depend on the spatial placement of pollinator-enhancing measures. Because landscape functions respond differently to landscape composition and configuration, modelling multifunctionality requires systematic variation in landscape patterns. While recent advances in bio-economic modelling have improved our understanding of spatial trade-offs, most applications remain limited to a narrow set of landscape scenarios. To address this, we integrated a spatially explicit bio-economic model with ALGR, a newly developed landscape generator that produces an infinite variety of landscapes with varying composition and configuration. We applied this model to 50,000 simulated landscapes to assess multifunctionality across biodiversity, pollinator community size, crop pollination, caloric output, and economic gain. Our results show that there are different possible solutions for simultaneously optimizing multiple functions, but they depend on the functions considered. Landscapes optimizing multifunctionality based on all ecological and economic functions had large fields, medium-wide grassy margins, and a high cover of semi-natural grasslands. On the other hand, when optimizing ecological functions alone, wide grassy margins and small fields are preferable. Our results also show that subsidies are required in order to increase landscape multifunctionality in a way that would maintain both ecosystem functioning and profit simultaneously.