California is a national leader of both solar energy development and agricultural production. As water becomes scarcer and costlier, there is growing tension among land use choices centered around maintaining conventional agricultural systems, transitioning land to renewable energy farming through solar energy development, or pursuing alternate land uses (e.g., housing development). Placing solar arrays on farmland and other human-modified landscapes represents a promising area to unite energy production with ecological restoration and the sustained conservation of ecologically valuable land, while also supporting innovative agricultural practices in landscapes increasingly challenged by extraordinary drought and heat stress. Despite the potential ecological and economic synergistic benefits that coupling these land uses could create, the impacts of solar arrays on fallowed farmland, rangelands, and other disturbed landscapes are not well understood. We have identified ecological synergies and tradeoffs following the integrating of utility-scale solar arrays on California central coast grazing lands, including shifts in plant community structure, soil properties, and biogeochemical dynamics. These findings have implications for the development of solar farms in the arid west and highlight the need to establish a threshold of ecological-sensitivity to array placement across ecosystems.
