Biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: Saving natural capital without losing interest.

While species extinctions continue to be a matter of extreme concern, changes in biodiversity in the world's agricultural landscapes have largely escaped attention. Implicitly, the world community has traded off biodiversity in these landscapes against the conservation of threatened endemics in protected areas. But biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes also has an opportunity cost. It affects not just the production of food, fuels, and fibers, but also a range of ecological services supporting, for example, water supplies, habitat, and health. Although increasing attention is being paid to the environmental context of modern agriculture, its role in biodiversity conservation has been largely ignored.