Does conservation on farmland contribute to halting the biodiversity decline?

Kleijn, David; Rundlöf, Maj; Scheper, Jeroen; Smith, Henrik G.; Tscharntke, Teja

doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.05.009

Cited by 546 publications

(481 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…While nature organizations are increasingly willing to cooperate with livestock farmers, many farmers show little interest in managing nutrient-poor or wet grasslands. In addition, land sharing strategies, in particular agri-environmental schemes, are not achieving the expected results (Balmford et al, 2012;Kleijn et al, 2011Kleijn et al, , 2001Pe'er et al, 2014). This makes it difficult for land planners to assess whether a land sharing or sparing policy is preferable.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Lerouge

Sannen²,

Gulinck

et al. 2016

Environmental Science & Policy

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Land is a scarce resource and should be used in such a way that the increasing global demand for food and feed can be fulfilled, while ensuring sufficient levels of ecosystem services. While the demand on open space to deliver a multitude of services is increasing, drivers like global change and urbanization are undermining these services. Decision makers, from individual farmers to spatial planners, are in need of appropriate diagnostic tools to estimate trade-offs and synergies associated with land allocation and land use intensity decisions. This often implies trade-offs between food and biomass production and other non-provisioning ecosystem services. This paper presents an assessment on the farm scale using an integrated approach that combines spatial and economic analyses. It relies on the ecosystem services concept to evaluate land use alternatives. The analysis highlights current challenges to reach a societal optimal land allocation. INTRODUCTIONPopulation pressure results in an increasing demand for food and bio-energy products and hence also in an increasing demand for agricultural land (Meyfroidt et al., 2013;Tscharntke et al., 2012). This demand is in competition with the additional demand for land for residential, conservation, forestry, recreational, and other purposes (Zasada, 2011). With land as an increasingly scarce resource, spatial planners seek to balance land use allocation among competing stakeholders. This has led to a polarization in land use policies between demands for expanding urbanized fabric and the remaining open space used for agriculture, whilst natural areas are largely pushed back to relatively small and fragmented relics. Spatial planning has mainly focused on allocation of land to space demanding sectors and minimizing spatial conflicts. This approach falls short in considering present-day demands for multifunctionality, sustainability, ecosystem services, resilience and adaptive governance. While an integrative and spatially explicit approach to land allocation is highly needed, it is largely missing (Bomans et al., 2010b;Termorshuizen and Opdam, 2009). Particularly in strongly urbanized regions, the relation between the availability and use of space, and the potential services this space is able to provide to society, needs to be explored further. Increasing service delivery per unit of space can allow a decreasing spatial requirement for delivering this service, and hence, freeing space for other services. Fragmented peri-urban landscapes in particular, where interfaces between different forms of land use and associated actors are plenty, are in need of innovative concepts for land use allocation. Meanwhile, concepts of multifunctionality and ecosystem services already bridge the distinction between classical sectors like agriculture, nature and forestry. In the light of food and biomass production, the principal challenge is to simultaneously assess and maximize production as well as the other ES provided by bioproductive land (Balmford et al., 2012) which inevi...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Lerouge

Sannen²,

Gulinck

et al. 2016

Environmental Science & Policy

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“…It increased from urbanized areas to urban-agricultural transitional landscapes and then decreased dramatically in intensive agricultural landscape as a consequence of landscape simplification mainly due to agriculture intensification (Kleijn et al, 2011;Bonfanti et al, 1997).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban-rural gradient detection using multivariate spatial analysis and landscape metrics

Vizzari¹,

Sigura²

2013

J Agricult Engineer

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The gradient approach allows for an innovative representation of landscape composition and configuration not presupposing spatial discontinuities typical of the conventional methods of analysis. Also the urban-rural dichotomy can be better understood through a continuous landscape gradient whose characterization changes accordingly to natural and anthropic variables taken into account and to the spatio-temporal scale adopted for the study. The research was aimed at the analysis of an urban-rural gradient within a study area located in central Italy, using spatial indicators associated with urbanization, agriculture and natural elements. A multivariate spatial analysis (MSA) of such indicators enabled the identification of urban, agricultural and natural dominated areas, as well as specific landscape transitions where the most relevant relationships between agriculture and other landscape components were detected. Landscapes derived from MSA were studied by a set of key landscape pattern metrics within a framework oriented to the structural characterization of the whole urban-rural gradient. The results showed two distinct sub-gradients: one urban-agricultural and one agricultural-natural, both characterized by different fringe areas. This application highlighted how the proposed methodology can represent a reliable approach supporting modern landscape planning and management.

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“…Under such schemes farmers are financially compensated for carrying out biodiversityenhancing land-use measures (Finn and Ó hUallacháin 2012). However, according to research studies (Kleijn et al 2011, Kleijn and Sutherland 2003, Marggraf 2003 and farmland biodiversity indicators (Statistisches Bundesamt 2010), the success of existing agrienvironment schemes in terms of conservation is mixed at best. One of the reasons for this failure is, to our knowledge, the lack of approaches and decision support tools which systematically assess the effectiveness and costs of a large set of potential land-use measures on a national or regional scale, despite the growing body of research in this field (Drechsler et al 2007, Johst et al 2002, Primdahl et al 2010; for integrated modelling approaches see also Rossing et al 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic approach for assessing spatially and temporally differentiated opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation measures in grasslands

Mewes

Drechsler

Johst

et al. 2015

Agricultural Systems

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in II 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.

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Does conservation on farmland contribute to halting the biodiversity decline?

Cited by 546 publications

References 84 publications

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Revisiting production and ecosystem services on the farm scale for evaluating land use alternatives

Urban-rural gradient detection using multivariate spatial analysis and landscape metrics

A systematic approach for assessing spatially and temporally differentiated opportunity costs of biodiversity conservation measures in grasslands

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