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Project Topic
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Given increasing recognition of the importance of agrobiodiversity in agricultural landscapes, we identify integrative collaborative landscape-level planning as a promising approach to achieve more targeted adoption of diversified agro-ecological measures. Our project aims to develop and apply an interdisciplinary methodological framework for data- and stakeholder-based identification and evaluation of practices enhancing agrobiodiversity, including collaborative landscape-level approaches. The goal is to characterise, measure, and incentivise agrobiodiversity, in order to enhance resilience and multifunctionality across farms, from field to landscape level. The approach prioritises the integration of agri-environmental and socio-economic perspectives, and will be grounded in site-specific data representing five regional case-studies in France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the UK. As a first step, we propose to evaluate promising diversification practices across different EU contexts, with specific focus on the enhancement of agrobiodiversity from field to landscape scales. Practices will be selected to represent the range and distribution of agricultural management approaches applicable in each case study region, e.g. agroforestry, hedgerow restoration, crop rotation, croplivestock integration, and the establishment of flower-rich field margins. We will then blend participatory methods, modelling approaches and ground-truthed data to identify and validate relevant and measurable agrobiodiversity indicators, selected to facilitate performance assessments of evaluated farming practices on agrobiodiversity, landscape complexity, and related agroecosystem services (e.g., carbon storage, agricultural yield). Stakeholder participation will allow identification of broader visions on agrobiodiversity, opportunities and limitations associated with management practices to promote it, and effective agri-environmental schemes to incentivise it. Finally, the project will integrate field- and farm-level data with landscape-level spatial analyses and collaborative scenario development to upscale findings and redesign agricultural systems at the landscape level. This will allow for the identification of trade-offs and synergies between the delivery of different ecosystem services and the assessment of the multifunctionality and resilience of the proposed systems. CLEAR proposes a novel approach for landscape-level decision-making, based on the identification of links between diversification practices, agroecological processes and socioeconomic dynamics. Expected outcomes will include system-based methods and tools for assessing agrobiodiversity and its outcomes at the landscape level, scenarios integrating stakeholder aims with diversified agricultural system configurations, and novel designs of agri-environmental schemes. Project results will be disseminated via scientific publications, technical support guidelines (e.g., for farm extension networks), and stakeholder-relevant policy recommendations. Ultimately the proposed research will lead to a policy framework to support and incentivise collaborative planning with the goal of creating multifunctional and resilient agricultural landscapes that reconcile agrobiodiversity conservation and food security under global change.
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