Reconciling agricultural production with biodiversity conservation. Группа авторов

Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes (EMBAL)

       8Alien species

       9Other monitoring approaches

       10New approaches and technologies

       11Conclusions

       12Where to look for further information

       13References

1Introduction

      Following the acknowledgement that biodiversity in agricultural lands globally and in the European Union (EU) has been strongly impacted by the intensification of agricultural practices (Dudley and Alexander, 2017; IPBES, 2019), many efforts have been carried out to revert the trend, starting with agri-environmental schemes becoming compulsory for EU Member States in 1992 (EU Regulation 2078/92) (Batary et al., 2015) aimed at reducing pressures from agriculture in order to meet environmental objectives such as the protection or enhancement of biodiversity, the improvement of soil, water, landscape and air quality, climate change mitigation and adaptation.

      Through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) cycles that followed, the concern for biodiversity has been embedded into the legislation as a target in general (e.g. protection and enhancement of biodiversity in axis 2 of rural development policy) and in specific terms (e.g. high nature value farming and forestry) (2006/144/EC). Persisting concerns about the fate of biodiversity, which emerged most evidently in the public consultation on modernizing and simplifying the common agricultural policy launched by the European Commission (EC) in 2017¹, have been embedded in the legislative proposal for the CAP post-2020 (COM (2018) 392 final), which identifies as one of its nine priorities to ‘contribute to the protection of biodiversity, enhance ecosystem services and preserve habitats and landscapes’.

      In parallel, environmental legislation through the decades has targeted rare and threatened species, and rare natural habitats (EEC, 1979; EEC, 1992; European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2009): as a result, the European Union currently hosts the largest coordinated network of protected areas in the world, the Natura 2000 Network². By adding the concept of restoration to the protection concept, the legislation of the past two decades has widened the scope, addressing all habitats and not only those more endangered and ecologically valuable. This started with the Commission’s proposal to the Gothenburg European Council (EC, 2001), which calls for protecting and restoring habitats and natural systems and halting the loss of biodiversity by 2010, a concept which was reinforced in the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 (EC, 2011). The latter, introducing the concept of ecosystem services, makes all habitats possible targets for restoration. In particular, target 3, which relates to agriculture specifically, defines the goal of maximizing 'areas under agriculture across grasslands, arable land and permanent crops that are covered by biodiversity-related measures under the CAP so as to ensure the conservation of biodiversity and to bring about a measurable improvement in the conservation status of species and habitats that depend on or are affected by agriculture and in the provision of ecosystem services as compared to the EU2010 Baseline, thus contributing to enhance sustainable management'. The EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2030 reinforces this line of action by dedicating a whole section to bringing nature back to agricultural land (EC, 2020 – Section 2.2.2)³.

      Lastly, legislative requirements that contribute to biodiversity preservation also include the so-called 'environmental safeguards' directives, requiring formal environmental assessments to be carried out for projects (under Directive 85/337/EEC⁴ and following amendments), and plans/programs (under Directive 2001/42/EC⁵) with potential detrimental effects, including on biodiversity and habitats.

      To assess the effectiveness of such efforts different techniques are applied, spanning from the analysis of case study areas (Kettunen and Ten Brink, 2006; Kleijn et al., 2006) to the use of proxies (Alliance Environnement, 2017) or models (Kok et al., 2018). In this frame, there is, overall, a lack of data recorded through monitoring efforts, EU wide assessments are in fact presently relying on a limited set of surveyed data: farmland birds (Gregory et al., 2005⁶), grassland butterflies (EEA, 2013a) and the reporting under the Birds and Habitats Directive (EC, 2015).

      Biodiversity decline, and in particular the loss of genetic diversity, is within the nine global-scale processes that are essential to maintain the earth system in a resilient and accommodating state defined by Steffen et al. (2015), one of the two processes laying outside the safe operating space. Despite the urgency to revert the trend and the efforts from the policy side to incorporate the concern, signals are not encouraging (EC, 2020). Better targeting and improved assessments need filling knowledge gaps and using updated and detailed data, covering different taxa. Moreover, in the frame of planning, implementing, monitoring and assessing EU policy, sources of information should cover the entire European Union, and should be based on a harmonized approach for data collection. Establishing surveys is an important way to guarantee that such information becomes available.

      The EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020 defines biodiversity as ‘the unique variety of life on our planet’, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity as ‘the variability among living organisms from all sources including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems’ (UN, 1993). Such definitions suggest a complexity that is probably the reason why it has been so difficult to put in place a large-scale monitoring system that includes surveys of the main components of biodiversity. Surveys can be burdensome and therefore the costs can exceed current financial and administrative capacity, especially when an entire continent should be covered. Nevertheless, initiatives and pilots are ongoing, to enlarge the available data pool.

      This chapter reviews where we stand in surveying biodiversity in agricultural areas at the EU level as well as plans to increase monitoring efforts. The sections that follow describe established surveys, ongoing pilots and plans for new surveys at the EU scale. A multiplicity of information is available at local/regional/national scale, but this chapter focusses on the long and winding road to wall-to-wall coverage of the European Union. At the end, the point can be made on where we will stand in the short-medium term with our knowledge of agro-biodiversity in the European Union, and which gaps still need to be filled to appropriately and sufficiently describe biodiversity dynamics.

2Farmland birds and butterflies

      2.1 The Pan-European common bird monitoring scheme

      Many