Agricultural landscapes in Central Europe provide a great potential for biodiversity. However, due to increasing intensification, structural change and land consolidation in favor of higher resource efficiency, biodiversity in agricultural landscapes has come under increased pressure. In recent years, there has been a steady increase in knowledge about the role of crop management and agricultural landscape management in promoting biodiversity. However, many of these measures, such as increased heterogeneity with small fields, diverse structural elements, and diversified crop rotations, are often seen as operationally challenging in agricultural practice. In particular, the conflicting goals between the different dimensions of sustainable farm optimization remain largely ignored.
This PhD project aims to develop digitally supported decision support tools that allow agricultural practitioners to easily derive scenarios for evaluating the environmental performance of their management practices, while allowing them to experience potential trade-offs or synergies with their business performance. In the first part of this PhD project, the methodological foundations and tools will be developed. These will then be applied in the second part of the project using 18 example companies in Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria and thus evaluated for their usability in business practice.
