Agri‐environment schemes (AES) compensate farmers for land use measures that are costly to them but beneficial to biodiversity and the environment. We present an ecological‐economic modeling procedure for the design of cost‐effective AES to conserve grassland biodiversity, which is applicable to large areas, covers many endangered species and grassland types, and includes several hundred different types of mowing regimes, grazing regimes, and combinations of mowing and grazing regimes as land use measures. The modeling procedure also accounts for the spatial variations in the land use measures' costs and in the effects on species and grassland types. The procedure's main novelty is that it considers variations of the costs and impacts on species and grassland types that arise from different timings of the land use measures. Considering the spatial and the temporal dimension of land use measures makes the modeling procedure spatiotemporally explicit. We demonstrate the power of the modeling procedure by evaluating an existing grassland AES in Saxony, Germany, and identify substantial improvements in terms of cost‐effectiveness.
Climate change has become a key threat to biodiversity. As a response to climate change, species may adapt spatially (with range shifts) and temporally (with phenological adaptations), which may alter the impact of conservation measures. In cultural landscapes, where conservation often depends on specifically-timed land use, climate change may also induce spatial changes in opportunity costs of conservation measures and with respect to their timing. Thus, previously cost-effective conservation efforts may become less cost-effective. We develop a climate-ecological-economic model to investigate climate change-induced modifications of the cost-effective spatio-temporal allocation of conservation measures. We apply the model to a case study to investigate the cost-effectiveness of grassland measures to conserve the large marsh grasshopper in Northern Germany for the periods 2020-2039 and 2060-2079. Our model shows modifications in the cost-effective spatial allocation of conservation measures and that the timing of measures adapted to phenological changes remain cost-effective under climate change.
Payments to compensate landowners for carrying out costly land-use measures that benefit endangered biodiversity have become an important policy instrument. When designing such payments, it is important to take into account that spatially connected habitats are more valuable for many species than isolated ones. One way to incentivize provision of connected habitats is to offer landowners an agglomeration bonus, that is, a bonus on top of payments they are receiving to conserve land if the land is spatially connected. Researchers have compared the cost-effectiveness of the agglomeration bonus with 2 alternatives: an all-or-nothing, agglomeration payment, where landowners receive a payment only if the conserved land parcels have a certain level of spatial connectivity, and a spatially homogeneous payment, where landowners receive a payment for conserved land parcels irrespective of their location. Their results show the agglomeration bonus is rarely the most cost-effective option, and when it is, it is only slightly better than one of the alternatives. This suggests that the agglomeration bonus should not be given priority as a policy design option. However, this finding is based on consideration of only 1 species. We examined whether the same applied to 2 species, one for which the homogeneous payment is best and the other for which the agglomeration payment is most cost-effective. We modified a published conceptual model so that we were able to assess the cost-effectiveness of payment schemes for 2 species and applied it to a grassland bird and a grassland butterfly in Germany that require the same habitat but have different spatial-connectivity needs. When conserving both species, the agglomeration bonus was more cost-effective than the agglomeration and the homogeneous payment; thus, we showed that as a policy the agglomeration bonus is a useful conservation-payment option.
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AbstractBiodiversity loss in Europe is caused to a large extent by agricultural intensification. To halt this loss and to support species and habitat types in agricultural areas, agri-environment schemes have been introduced in Europe to compensate farmers for (costly) conservation measures. Currently, agri-environment schemes for grassland in general consider only a few conservation measures with fixed dates and a payment for average opportunity costs, e.g. for later mowing. A systematic approach that calculates farmers` opportunity costs in relation to the timing of grassland use is still lacking. We fill this gap by developing a systematic agrieconomic cost assessment approach. Our approach is general enough to be applicable on a large spatial scale but can still sensitively differentiate among different timings. Moreover it is straightforward and time-saving enough to be suitable for implementation in regional scale optimisation procedures. We demonstrate this by applying the systematic cost assessment in the decision support software DSS-Ecopay using the example of grassland species and habitats conservation in the German federal state of Saxony.
For a surface F in 3-space that is represented by a set S of sample points, we construct a coarse approximating polytope P that uses a subset of S as its vertices and preserves the topology of F.
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