Abstract
In Western Europe the fate of biodiversity is intimately linked to agricultural land use. A driving force behind biodiversity decline is the gradual conversion of Europe’s traditional integrated rural landscapes of nature and agriculture into monofunctional units of production. With these developments, semi-natural landscape elements have increasingly disappeared from agricultural landscapes. A growing body of research, however, underlines the importance of semi-natural habitats in agricultural landscapes for biodiversity conservation, habitat connectivity, and ecosystem services. On the local scale, considerable variation between the relative area of landscape elements on individual farms can be observed. Farm management decisions are presumed to be important determinants for the composition of agricultural landscapes and the services provided to society. By bringing together data from farmer interviews and aerial photographic imagery, this paper analyzes the predictive validity of farm management characteristics to understand the distribution of landscape elements on farmland parcels. The farm management parameters included in the study are relevant to current dominant trends in the Dutch agricultural sector; intensification, scale enlargement, diversification, and gradual termination of farming activities. Scale enlargement and migratory processes are found to be important predictors. The results of the Dutch case study provide insights in the threats and opportunities for the conservation of semi-natural habitat in agricultural landscapes. The findings present an empirical contribution to the debate on sustainable management of agriculture’s green infrastructure and, in broader perspective, the objective to reconcile agricultural production with the urging need of biodiversity conservation in Europe’s spatially contested countryside.
Highlights
From a bird’s-eye view, the countryside in the Netherlands is an apparent expression of complex human-environment interactions
31.8 percent of the respondents, landscape elements account for 1–5 percent of their agricultural land use
Policy and land management efforts can benefit from a greater understanding of the relationship between farm management and landscape outcomes to improve effective targeting and identify the main drivers and threats to valuable landscape functions
Summary
From a bird’s-eye view, the countryside in the Netherlands is an apparent expression of complex human-environment interactions. A growing body of research indicates that these semi-natural landscape elements are among the most important factors in predicting biodiversity in agricultural landscapes in Europe (Aviron et al 2005; Benton et al 2003; Billeter et al 2008; Burel et al 1998; Grashof-Bokdam & Langevelde 2005; Michel et al 2006). In addition to its role for biodiversity conservation and ecosystem functioning, semi-natural landscape elements serve as green amenities that are important to the aesthetic, historical, and cultural value of a landscape (Agger & Brandt 1988; Burel & Baudry 1995; Fry & Sarlöv-Herlin 1997). Many semi-natural and natural landscape elements have lost their traditional economic functions (field partitioning and fuel), despite their services to society, and disappeared from Europe’s agricultural landscapes (Grashof-Bokdam & Langevelde 2005)
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