The role of agri-environment schemes in conservation and environmental management
By P. Batáry, L. Dicks, D. Kleijn, W. J. Sutherland. Conservation Biology, 2015
947 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over half of the European landscape is under agricultural management and has been for millennia. Many species and ecosystems of conservation concern in Europe depend on agricultural management and are showing ongoing declines. Agri‐environment schemes (AES) are designed partly to address this. They are a major source of nature conservation funding within the European Union (EU) and the highest conservation expenditure in Europe. We reviewed the structure of current AES across Europe. Since a 2003 review questioned the overall effectiveness of AES for biodiversity, there has been a plethora of case studies and meta‐analyses examining their effectiveness. Most syntheses demonstrate general increases in farmland biodiversity in response to AES, with the size of the effect depending on the structure and management of the surrounding landscape. This is important in the light of successive EU enlargement and ongoing reforms of AES. We examined the change in effect size over time by merging the data sets of 3 recent meta‐analyses and found that schemes implemented after revision of the EU's agri‐environmental programs in 2007 were not more effective than schemes implemented before revision. Furthermore, schemes aimed at areas out of production (such as field margins and hedgerows) are more effective at enhancing species richness than those aimed at productive areas (such as arable crops or grasslands). Outstanding research questions include whether AES enhance ecosystem services, whether they are more effective in agriculturally marginal areas than in intensively farmed areas, whether they are more or less cost‐effective for farmland biodiversity than protected areas, and how much their effectiveness is influenced by farmer training and advice? The general lesson from the European experience is that AES can be effective for conserving wildlife on farmland, but they are expensive and need to be carefully designed and targeted.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Global and Planetary Change, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aabc95a8f81ad565954176d2f766ed4d878c78aa
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Global and Planetary Change
In Plant Science
Citations in the corpus
- Flower-strip agri-environment schemes provide diverse and valuable summer flower resources for pollinating insects (2018, background): “landscape, seed bank, insect diversity, farming practices) is essential to assess pertinence and identify improvements to composition and management (Dicks et al. 2013; Batáry et al. 2015).”
- Insect pollinators collect pollen from wind‐pollinated plants: implications for pollination ecology and sustainable agriculture (2018, background): “This may be one reason why many studies find that the effectiveness of onfarm conservation measures (e.g. wildflower strips) is influenced by the amount of natural or seminatural habitat in the surrounding landscape (Scheper et al., 2013; Bat ary et al., 2015; Campbell et al., 2017).”
- Attractiveness of wildflower mixtures for wild bees and hoverflies depends on some key plant species (2018, background): “To counteract these negative effects of modern agricultural practices, agri-environmental schemes (AES) are implemented in numerous European countries to maintain and restore biodiversity in agricultural landscapes (Bat ary et al., 2015).”
- Landscape impacts on pollinator communities in temperate systems: evidence and knowledge gaps (2017, positive): “AES are widely used to support biodiversity of multiple taxa in agricultural landscapes, but they remain controversial due to their high cost and variable success (Batary et al. 2015).”