Land sparing or sharing: A paired stream study to evaluate the relationship between land use configuration and macroinvertebrate diversity in streams

Increasing food production often comes at the cost of habitat loss, which contributes to declining biodiversity. Consequently, balancing global food production with biodiversity conservation is a growing challenge, particularly as agricultural production expands and intensifies to meet the needs of a growing human population. The land sharing–land sparing (LSLS) framework presents two contrasting strategies for managing the trade-off between food production and biodiversity conservation. Land sharing involves low-intensity agriculture being interspersed within heterogeneous landscapes that retain natural habitats, whereas land sparing concentrates high-yield agriculture in some areas to allow separate areas to remain undisturbed as natural habitat designated for conservation. While LSLS has been studied extensively in terrestrial ecosystems, its relevance for freshwater ecosystems, despite their exceptional biodiversity and vulnerability, remains largely unexplored. Here, we evaluate how aquatic macroinvertebrate diversity is influenced by LSLS land use configurations in agricultural landscapes of Pennsylvania, USA. We compared macroinvertebrate community metrics (taxa richness, evenness, total abundance), and community composition between paired stream reaches—one flowing through a land sharing landscape configuration and the other through a land sparing configuration. The paired study design ensured streams were matched for physical habitat characteristics and most water quality variables known to influence macroinvertebrates, thus allowing us to isolate any potential impacts of land configuration per se. We found no significant differences in analyzed macroinvertebrate community metrics or composition between paired streams flowing through land sharing versus land sparing configurations. The only differences identified were small changes in the abundance of collector-filterers that are likely to be biologically insignificant. As one of the first empirical tests of the LSLS framework in aquatic ecosystems, these findings suggest that the spatial configuration of agricultural land use, whether integrated with or spatially separated from natural habitat, may have limited influence on macroinvertebrate diversity in streams, cautioning against overgeneralizing terrestrial conservation strategies for use in freshwater ecosystems.