European Network on Farmland Heterogeneity, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Agricultural landscapes occupy 40% of the available land area, and as such play an important role in conserving biodiversity. Farmland biodiversity makes an important contribution to agricultural production by providing ecosystem services such as crop pollination and biological control of crop pests. In many regions farm fields are becoming ever larger, and many agricultural regions are now dedicated to the production of a small number of crop types. What are the effects of these changes in farmland pattern on farmland biodiversity and the ecosystem services important for agricultural production? Are there policies which, if followed, would improve biodiversity and ecosystem services in farmlands without compromising agricultural production? FARMLAND is an international research program aimed at addressing these questions. Previous work has demonstrated that agricultural landscapes which contain significant areas of semi-natural lands have higher biodiversity and better ecosystem services than farmlands with less semi-natural lands. These results have led to policies where farmers are paid to leave semi-natural field margins or insert semi-natural strips into crop fields. Such policies require taking crop area out of production. There are many situations where this may not be feasible. It has been suggested that, in addition to the area of semi-natural habitats, the spatial heterogeneity of the cropped lands may be positively related to biodiversity and provision of ecosystem services. If this is true, then it may be possible to develop new policies for agriculture that could restore biodiversity and associated ecosystem services by increasing farmland heterogeneity, without reducing cropped area. The aim of FARMLAND is to test this idea and to help develop such policies. The research will be conducted in 3 work packages (WP). The first work package aims at disentangling the relationships between landscape heterogeneity and 8 components of biological diversity. It will quantify relationships between farmland pattern and biodiversity through mensurative experiments that will collect standardized data in 6 agricultural regions across Europe: one in Germany, four in France, and one in Spain. The second WP consists of true experiments and analyses that will assess the links between landscape heterogeneity and regulating ecosystem services (pollination and/or biological control). They will be conducted in the 6 regions. The results of WP1 and WP2 will clarify how the effects of landscape structure on biodiversity affect regulating, supporting and cultural ecosystem services and in turn food provisioning. They will be used to identify which indices of biodiversity best represent the ecosystem services biodiversity provides. The third work package, WP3, will use existing data and methods based on interviews (i) to map the diversity of farming systems and their socio-technical management; (ii) to describe and compare farmers' mental models of the ecological functioning of their farms and its relationships to biodiversity dynamics. Finally, we will organize workshops with the main stakeholders (iii) to collectively build and discuss, on the basis of the above results, acceptable and economically feasible recommendations for policy-makers that enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services in farmland.