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Two strategies are often promoted to mitigate the effects of agricultural expansion on biodiversity: one integrates wildlife‐friendly habitats within farmland (land sharing), and the other intensifies farming to allow the offset of natural reserves (land sparing). Their relative merits for biodiversity protection have been subject to much debate, but no previous study has examined whether trade‐offs between the two strategies depend on the proximity of farmed areas to large tracts of natural habitat.

We sampled birds and dung beetles across contiguous forests and agricultural landscapes (low‐intensity cattle farming) in a threatened hotspot of endemism: the Colombian Chocó‐Andes. We test the hypothesis that the relative biodiversity benefits of either strategy depend partially on the degree to which farmlands are isolated from large contiguous blocks of forest.

We show that distance from forest mediates the …