Synergies Between Agricultural Production and Shorebird Conservation With Climate Change in the Central Valley, California, With Optimized Water Allocation and Multi-Benefit Land Use

Conservation planning that enhances the resiliency of biodiversity to climate change requires adaptive water and land use decision-making in the most cost-efficient way. This has many challenges since landscapes with high biodiversity can embrace intense human production activities, particularly agriculture. Conventionally, water and land used for conservation are often regarded as tradeoffs to agricultural productivity. However, this study found that agricultural water and land use synergize with shorebird conservation in the Central Valley, California. If informed decisions are made to guide strategic land use, landscapes can adapt to climate change and offer multiple benefits. This study used a coupled economic optimization model with a species distribution model to consider human factors in ecological impacts. The objective was to assess the impacts of agricultural water and land use decisions under different climate change scenarios on 10 shorebird species populations in California's Central Valley. Our results showed that strategic water and land management can offer favorable habitats to targeted shorebirds with a land composition including diversified crop categories complementary to wetlands. This study demonstrates that agricultural lands can be as important as wetlands to shorebirds to sustain their migratory stages throughout the year. Wetland restoration without species habitat preference information can lead to population shrinkage since wetland types vary in habitat importance to the shorebird species studied in this research. Business as usual, along with land use and climate change, will decrease shorebirds' breeding season and population to the same degree as they impact non-breeding populations. The synergies between agricultural production and shorebird conservation were found in the scenarios that favor agricultural production water use but also favor habitat provisioning to shorebirds in the Central Valley, California, under climate change.