Planning agriculture based on landuse responses of threatened semiarid grassland species in India

Balancing biodiversity conservation and rural food security is a pressing challenge for developing countries, with tropical agro-grasslands facing particularly high human dependence and species' endangerment. We explored the potential influences of agricultural growth and allocation of multiple landuses on the status of two threatened species inhabiting semiarid agro-grasslands of India. Sampling 1 km2 cells for flagship lesser florican Sypheotides indica and 0.03 ha plots for spiny-tailed lizard Saara hardwickii, we modeled species' abundances with land-cover, vegetation structure, and disturbances using N-mixture (florican) and poisson (lizard) models. Florican abundance responded unimodally to herbaceous biomass (grassland proportion × ground-vegetation height), wherein, numbers peaked at optimally large combinations of grassland proportion (0.5-1) and ground-vegetation height (35-65 cm). Whereas, lizard abundance was positively influenced by grassland occurrence and ground-vegetation < 50 cm cover but negatively influenced by cropland occurrence. Livestock grazing promoted short vegetation over tall vegetation, partially hindering florican but facilitating lizard. Such inter-specific differences in landuse response invoked multi-criteria planning based on surrogates of ecologically distinct species-groups. Fitting our models to simulated landuse scenarios, we demonstrated that managing florican habitats as grassland interspersed with croplands and pastures spared rotationally provided optimal results at low production-level. However, projected agricultural growth would cause considerable declines of florican (>30%) and lizard (>20%) populations. To prevent this, remaining florican occupied agro-grasslands should be secured as Community/Conservation reserves so that further landuse conversions can be legally restricted. Simultaneously, government schemes like food provisioning to small farmers through public distribution system could be harnessed to compensate for production deficit within/adjoining reserves.