Approaches towards a European Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes

Abstract

The EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 aims to halt the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the European Union (EU). One major driver in the loss of biodiversity is the agricultural management in many European landscapes. There is a growing pressure that far more efficient biodiversity measures in a much wider extent have to be taken in order to achieve the aims of the EU Biodiversity Strategy. However, up to now an implemented monitoring of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes is widely missing. Thus the need for a robust and coherent monitoring methodology is apparent. Such a monitoring would also enhance the data availability for the biodiversity indicators used for the evaluation of European policy, e.g. the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and would help to specify detailed targets on national and regional levels.

For the development towards such a European monitoring approach the European Commission launched the project EMBAL ("European Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes”) in 2017. In this approach a rapid assessment of the structure of the agricultural landscape and the state of farmland biodiversity was developed considering the results of a thorough analysis and elements of 13 existing monitoring approaches at national and European scale. Elements of the High Nature Value (HNV-) Farmland indicator (Peppiette et al 2012), the LISA-approach (IFAB 2015 / 2017) and other approaches in Europe (Herzog et al. 2016) were included in the new approach and a concrete manual was drafted and agreed on European level. A field test in five European countries has been carried out and the applicability of the drafted methodology could be approved. The EMBAL methodology is based on field surveys of plots with a size of 25 ha (500 x 500 m). The survey follows a three-fold approach: (1) an area survey (mapping), where parameters on agricultural parcels and landscape elements are recorded, (2) a vegetation survey based on transect walks, during which parameters of the vegetation and key species are assessed and (3) a photo documentation, which is a useful tool for the visual characterization of the plots as well as tracking change over time.

The presentation gives an overview on current approaches and the overarching EMBAL-approach. Further results of pilot investigations of the European monitoring of biodiversity are shown.

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