Indicators of Biodiversity and Conservational Wildlife Quality on Danish Organic Farms for Use in Farm Management: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Indicator Development and Testing

Abstract

Organic farming is expected to contribute to conserving national biodiversity on farms, especially remnant, old, and undisturbed small biotopes, forests, and permanent grassland. This objective cannot rely on the legislation of organic farming solely, and to succeed, farmers need to understand the goals behind it. A set of indicators with the purpose of facilitating dialogues between expert and farmer on wildlife quality has been developed and tested on eight organic farms. ''Weed cover in cereal fields,'' was used as an indicator of floral and faunal biodiversity in the cultivated land, and ''uncultivated biotope area'' on the farm was used as a general measure of wildlife habitats. Functional grouping of herbaceous plants (discriminating between ''high conservation value'' plant species and ''competitive''/ ''ruderal'' species) and low mobility butterflies were used as indicators of conservation value, especially focusing on the few sites left with considerable remnant conservation value. The dialog processes revealed that the organic farmers' ideas and goals of conservation of wildlife quality were not necessarily the same as for biologists; the farmers expressed very different opinions on the biological rooted idea, that wildlife quality is related to the absence of agricultural impact. However, farmers also stated that the information given by the indicators and especially the dialogue with the biologist had influenced their perception and awareness of wildlife. We conclude that, combined with a dialogue process, using these indicators when mapping wildlife quality could be an important key component of a farm wildlife management advisory tool at farm level.

Environmental impacts of organic agriculture in temperate regions.

“…Given the understanding of the key role of field margins and non-production areas in promoting biodiversity, revised organic regulations also need to consider outlining requirements for their establishment and maintenance. This will need to be done in the context of improved understanding of which non-farmed elements are more important, the relationship to landscape factors for various taxa, and even more broadly the sustainability of the farming system in relation to the agroecosystem carrying capacity within a region [4,95,101]. In general, the expansion of research examining ecological and environmental impacts of organic agriculture, sometimes tied to AES programmes (farmscaping and multifunctionality), is an important step in the evolution of organic agriculture as it shifts to a more outcomes-based system more in line with its founding principles rather than a farming system defined by permitted inputs and regulation of farming practices alone.…”

“…While the above advances in understanding of the relationship between farming system, landscape and biodiversity are encouraging, we are just beginning to understand the relationship between such biodiversity and ecosystem services such as pollination, pest control, SOC storage or water quality maintenance [13,79,[93][94][95]. Under semi-arid conditions in California, Smukler et al [13] reported that environmental variables (including SOC, infiltration rates and dissolved organic C), associated with non-crop habitats on an organic farm explained the on-farm distribution of plant and soil taxa.…”

What criteria should be used to select biodiversity indicators?

“…As our study only refers to articles listed in the Web of Science (WoS), work on practical applications of indicators may be underrepresented when published in reports, working papers, or other publications that are not listed in the WoS. This is likely why we found only a few articles where indicators were applied (e.g., de Heer et al 2005;Noe et al 2005).…”

“…Second, our classification was determined by our research questions (cf. Strauss and Corbin 1998;Kluge 1999) and by criteria often used to define indicators (Heink and Kowarik 2010;e.g. aggregation of ecological information, precision of correlation between indicator and indicandum, relevance of an indicator).…”

Farm level environmental indicators; are they useful?

“…A reason may be that these topics differ in their local or regional significance, which should be reflected in the choice of indicators (see, e.g. Oñate et al, 2000;Noe et al, 2003).…”