Context <p>To address the increasing food demand, it is often necessary to directly enhance food production through strategic land-use adjustments or cropland expansion. However, these strategies often lead to a series of negative ecological impacts, including biodiversity loss and increased water consumption. It is essential to explore how food production and ecological protection can be balanced under different decision-making objectives.</p> Objectives <p>By quantifying the trade-off boundaries between food production and multiple ecological indicators − representing the frontiers where gains in one objective require losses in another − and integrating practical constraints, landscape optimization security zones were identified. These zones are the areas where ecological indicators can improve without compromising, and potentially even enhancing, food production. The results can inform spatial planning practice for balancing agricultural productivity and ecological protection in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.</p> Methods <p>This study developed a novel landscape pattern optimization approach that generates two-dimensional trade-off boundaries and identifies trade-off thresholds. Under multiple scenarios, considering the baseline of food security and ecological protection thresholds, we identified landscape optimization security zones through the trade-off boundaries.</p> Results <p>While the length and curvature of the optimized landscape trade-off boundary curves varied across different scenarios, the overall concave-convex trends remained consistent. Achieving Pareto optimality under food production constraint scenario was associated with a 21.6% reduction in water consumption while without compromising grain yield. Additionally, net carbon sink and habitat quality improve by 25.0% and 14.8%, respectively, compared to the current trade-offs. The overlap between landscape optimization security zones and areas where agricultural and ecological benefits could be enhanced was only partial, highlighting distinct functional roles.</p> Conclusions <p>The landscape optimization security zones identified provides a structured framework for maximizing the co-benefits of food production and ecological protection, and offers policy-relevant insights for the multifunctional and sustainable planning of agricultural landscapes and natural habitats. And policy design should carefully account for the interaction between agricultural and ecological objectives, as increasing regulatory intensity may limit flexibility in achieving coordinated sustainability outcomes.</p>