The decline of biodiversity in Europe is mainly driven by biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes. This loss is to be countered by a variety of different tools. In Baden-Württemberg, these include incentive systems for farmers in the form of agri-environmental measures, the preservation of extensively managed landscape features, the state-wide biotope network and targets for changes in agricultural practices. To date, however, the contributions of these various tools to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes are poorly understood.
This gap will be filled in this project to provide a technical basis for optimizing the above-mentioned incentive systems and legal frameworks. Birds, for which extensive data sets are available and which clearly reflect biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes as an indicator group, are suitable as a study system. The analysis of the importance of different tools for biodiversity protection will be carried out in the project on the level of the country and for selected agricultural landscapes (for selection and coordination see project II). Landscape ecological neighborhood analyses will be used to analyze the effect of surrounding land use and protected landscape features on population trends of bird species. This nationwide analysis will be complemented by high-resolution surveys of land use and bird communities in selected agricultural landscapes.
