Farming is a major driver of biodiversity loss globally, particularly in the tropics, where regions of exceptional biodiversity coincide with intense pressure from forest conversion. Minimising biodiversity loss in these landscapes is critical. Land-sharing and land-sparing strategies offer contrasting approaches to managing this challenge. Land sharing integrates wildlife-friendly practices within farmland, while land sparing concentrates production to free up land for natural habitat conservation. Previous studies suggest that land sparing often delivers greater conservation benefits, especially in tropical cattle-farming systems. However, it remains unclear whether these outcomes hold across steep elevational gradients, such as those found in the tropical Andes. We address this question by evaluating bird communities along an elevational gradient (900–3400 m) in the eastern cordillera of Colombia, a biodiversity hotspot with many endemic and range-restricted species. Using extensive field data and scenario-based simulations, we compared the effects of land-sharing and land-sparing strategies on multiple dimensions of biodiversity (species richness, phylogenetic and functional diversity). this dataset includes occupancy probabilities to estimate avian communites along an elevational gradient, computations of changes in 12 biodiversity metrics from forest to pasture, simulated scenarios of land sharing and land sparing and comparison of metrics between the two management strategies. We found that species richness and Faith’s phylogenetic diversity were consistently higher under land sparing across all elevations. Sparing strategies also retained greater evolutionary uniqueness. In contrast, functional diversity metrics changed little across scenarios, suggesting strong functional redundancy in these communities.