In highly-biodiverse tropical landscapes, multiple-objective optimization reveals opportunities for increasing both conservation and agricultural production

In humid tropics, small and medium farming systems are important for producing food but also because they retain rainforest patches with high conservation value. Forest conservation and agricultural production strongly compete for land in Tropical Farming Systems (TFS). Finding solutions that synergize increasing conservation areas and agricultural production is an issue that has yet to be resolved in human-modified tropical landscapes. Achieving this objective requires analyzing how farms could be reorganized to relieve the pressure for production on the land. Pareto-based genetic algorithms that produce a set of solutions that satisfy apparently opposed objectives may tackle multi-objective problems. We explored trade-offs and synergies to increase the profits by sustainable intensification and maintain or increase rainforest areas in five TFS. There was a strong trade-off between conservation and economic profits in all TFS. However, depending on the total farming area, initial configurations and the amount of external inputs used, TFS showed low (two out of five) or high (three out of five) potential to increase forest conservation and profits. In low potential areas, the expansion of conservation areas and profits was only possible by increasing external inputs, primarily due to the limiting farming area and intensification status in those areas. In contrast, in high potential areas it was possible to increase conservation areas and profits through sustainable intensification practices, such as increasing maize silage, changing high for low use-pesticides crops but also reducing variable costs by minimizing cost-supply uses or external feeds. Alternative management and resource allocation options were specific for each TFS. The multi-objective simulation yielded novel results showing that it is possible to overcome the conservation-production antagonism (a regional-global scale issue) by adjusting management at farm (local) scale.