Coincidence of High Nature Value farmlands with bird and butterfly diversity

Sanna Mäkeläinen,Annika Harlio,Risto K Heikkinen,Irina Herzon,Mikko Kuussaari,Katri Lepikkö,Andrea Maier,Tuomas Seimola,Juha Tiainen,Anni Arponen

doi:10.1016/j.agee.2018.09.030

Abstract

The amount of High Nature Value farmland (HNVf) is a commonly used environmental indicator for assessing the performance of the Common Agricultural Policy, to support sustainable agriculture and monitor changes in agricultural land use in Europe. HNVf comprises agricultural areas of semi-natural state, low-intensity farming and fine-scale landscape mosaics of different habitat types. For a successful implementation, the identification of HNVf should correctly reflect the variation in biodiversity values between different agricultural landscapes. We examined how well the Finnish HNVf indicator and the sub-indicators constituting it – recalculated for the purposes of this study for five study regions – reflect the variation in bird and butterfly species richness and diversity patterns at different spatial scales. We found that butterfly diversity index was positively associated with the HNVf indicator at the finest scale of 0.5 km × 0.5 km squares. Among the HNVf sub-indicators, extensive cultivation of grasslands was most strongly related to the farmland bird diversity and the density of edge to the butterfly diversity. Thus, the HNVf concept reflects well the distribution of butterflies in the Finnish agricultural landscapes but insufficiently the diversity patterns of farmland birds. Importantly, semi-natural vegetation and long-term pastures – the backbone of the concept – presently occur in small and highly fragmented patches in agricultural landscapes in Finland. The Pan-European concept of HNVf has restricted application to farmland birds of this boreal country and the national HNVf concept may need to be revised.

Highlights

There are contrasting challenges in using agricultural environments: the imperative for intensifying food production for the growing human population, on one hand, and the need for protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services within them, on the other hand (Foley et al, 2011)
Since the Finnish High Nature Value farmland (HNVf) indicator is based on separate sub-indicators that can relate in different ways to the diversity of birds and butterflies, we examined whether these HNVf sub-indicators relate to species diversity measures
We conducted the analysis at 1-km landscape scale for all birds, and at the scale of square for red-listed birds and all butterfly diversity measures since these scales showed most importance by the multimodel inference (Appendix F.3)

Summary

Introduction

There are contrasting challenges in using agricultural environments: the imperative for intensifying food production for the growing human population, on one hand, and the need for protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services within them, on the other hand (Foley et al, 2011). The concept of ‘High Nature Value farmlands’ was developed in recognition of the importance of certain characteristics of farmland for biodiversity in Europe (Andersen et al, 2003). Based on the High Nature Value farmland (hereafter HNVf) concept, a suite of farmland indicators was defined to assess the environmental performance of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and the effectiveness of Pillar 2 Rural Development Programs (Lomba et al, 2014). Only little is known about how well the HNVf-based indicators fulfil an important criterion of biodiversity indicators: a plausible association with the key underlying biodiversity elements, such as occurrences of declined and rare species (Gregory et al, 2005)

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