Agricultural production provides food, feed, and renewable energy, generates economic profits, and contributes to social welfare in many ways. However, intensive farming is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity. Although current market forces and regulations such as the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, seem to foster agricultural intensification, a socially and ecologically optimal land-use strategy should seek to reconcile agricultural production with biodiversity conservation. Research on spatial land-use allocation lacks studies that consider both aspects simultaneously. Therefore, we developed a method that finds land-use strategies with a maximum contribution to social welfare, taking into account the landscape’s biophysical potential. We applied a multiobjective optimization algorithm that identified landscape configurations that maximize agricultural production and biodiversity based on their contribution to social welfare. Social welfare was approximated by the profit contribution of agricultural production and society’s willingness to pay for biodiversity. The algorithm simultaneously evaluated the biophysical outcomes of different land uses using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and a biodiversity model. The method was applied to an agricultural landscape in central Germany. The results show that, in this area, overall social welfare can be increased compared to the status quo if both social benefits from biodiversity and economic profits from agricultural production are considered in land-use allocation. Further, the resulting optimal solutions can create win-win situations between the two, usually conflicting, objectives. The integration of preference information into the biophysical optimization allows reducing the usually large set of Pareto-optimal solutions and thus facilitates further stakeholder-based analyses. Our explorative study provides an example of how socioeconomic data and biophysical models can be combined to support decision making and the development of land-use policies.

中文翻译：

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将生物物理优化与经济偏好分析相结合，用于农业土地利用分配

农业生产提供粮食，饲料和可再生能源，产生经济利润，并在许多方面为社会福利做出贡献。但是，集约化农业是对生物多样性的最大威胁之一。尽管当前的市场力量和法规（例如欧盟的共同农业政策）似乎促进了农业集约化，但一种社会和生态上最优的土地利用策略应力求使农业生产与生物多样性保护相协调。关于空间土地利用分配的研究缺乏同时考虑这两个方面的研究。因此，我们开发了一种方法，该方法考虑了景观的生物物理潜力，找到了对社会福利有最大贡献的土地利用策略。我们应用了一种多目标优化算法，该算法根据对社会福利的贡献来确定可最大化农业生产和生物多样性的景观配置。社会福利由农业生产的利润贡献和社会为生物多样性支付的意愿来近似。该算法使用土壤和水评估工具（SWAT）和生物多样性模型同时评估了不同土地利用的生物物理结果。该方法已应用于德国中部的农业景观。结果表明，如果在土地利用分配中同时考虑到生物多样性带来的社会利益和农业生产带来的经济利益，则与现状相比，该地区的整体社会福利可以增加。进一步，最终的最佳解决方案可以在通常相互冲突的两个目标之间创造双赢局面。将偏好信息集成到生物物理优化中可以减少通常较大的帕累托最优解集，从而有助于进一步进行基于涉众的分析。我们的探索性研究提供了一个示例，说明如何将社会经济数据和生物物理模型相结合以支持决策和土地使用政策的制定。