Mitigating the impacts of the decline of traditional farming on mountain landscapes and biodiversity: a case study in the European Alps

Abstract

Taking a marginal area in the Italian Alps as a case study, we analysed the transition from traditional to modern dairy farming over the last decades. We explored potential causes and consequences of this process on land-use change, grassland farming, and biodiversity and proposed a regional agri-environment scheme (AES) to mitigate the impacts of the decline of traditional farming. Our results demonstrate that the number of traditional small farms strongly declines, being replaced by modern and larger farms. Despite previous studies showing a close relationship between this process and loss in grassland area, total meadow area does not change over the study period as modern farms progressively acquire the land formerly managed by traditional farms. Traditional farming systems are characterized by lower degree of specialization and use more environmentally friendly farming practices than modern systems. Importantly, our results indicate that the decline of traditional farming appears to be largely irreversible because it is closely linked to a broader process of social transformation. To mitigate this decline, we propose an AES that compensates farmers for keeping lower production of organic fertilizers at the farm scale and for maintaining the extensive management of steep meadows at the field scale. The proposed AES demonstrates to be positively related to both plant and insect diversity and might be easily implemented in future agri-environmental policy. However, we conclude that large and modern farms need to get more involved in biodiversity conservation as they will be the main actors in the future of Alpine farming.