Reconciling nature conservation and traditional farming practices: a spatially explicit framework to assess the extent of High Nature Value farmlands in the European countryside

Abstract

Agriculture constitutes a dominant land cover worldwide, and rural landscapes under extensive farming practices acknowledged due to high biodiversity levels. The High Nature Value farmland (HNVf) concept has been highlighted in the EU environmental and rural policies due to their inherent potential to help characterize and direct financial support to European landscapes where high nature and/or conservation value is dependent on the continuation of specific low-intensity farming systems. Assessing the extent of HNV farmland by necessity relies on the availability of both ecological and farming systems' data, and difficulties associated with making such assessments have been widely described across Europe. A spatially explicit framework of data collection, building out from local administrative units, has recently been suggested as a means of addressing such difficulties. This manuscript tests the relevance of the proposed approach, describes the spatially explicit framework in a case study area in northern Portugal, and discusses the potential of the approach to help better inform the implementation of conservation and rural development policies. Synthesis and applications: The potential of a novel approach (combining land use/cover, farming and environmental data) to provide more accurate and efficient mapping and monitoring of HNV farmlands is tested at the local level in northern Portugal. The approach is considered to constitute a step forward toward a more precise targeting of landscapes for agri-environment schemes, as it allowed a more accurate discrimination of areas within the case study landscape that have a higher value for nature conservation.

Governance Discourses Reflecting Tensions in a Multifunctional Land Use System in Decay; Tradition Versus Modernity in the Portuguese Montado

“…This may hopefully pave the way for the development of novel governance systems that are able to reproduce the montado system in a more sustainable way. Also, it may also serve as an inspiration for a similar reframing of the environmental degradation in other complex and multi-functional farming systems where prevailing trends towards globalization and intensification hampers their future sustainability [11,13,50], especially in view of current scenarios of climate and land use changes, which are largely acute across the Mediterranean context [56].…”

“…Indeed, the modern production discourse represents a step backwards in integrative farm governance, especially in relation to the farmer´s capacity to deal with complexity, a capacity that montado land owners have developed over generations [9][10][11] but that is now in peril of being permanently lost.…”

The Chosen Socio-Economic Problems of Protecting Valuable Agricultural Land in Natura 2000 Areas in Poland

“…10 European Parliament andCouncil Directive 2009/147 /EC of 30 November 2009 agriculture. It is estimated that out of 198 listed habitat types in the Habitats Directive 28 (14%) may be threatened by abandoning farming practices (Lomba et al, 2015).…”

“…The specificity of conservation measures under the N2000 network is not to eliminate agricultural activities, but to conduct them so that they do not threaten valuable species and habitats (Evans, 2012;Hermoso, Moran-Ordonez and Brotons, 2018;Lomba et al, 2015). In the case of farms located in N2000 areas, it is particularly important to introduce effective instruments encouraging retardation, i.e.…”

The use of biodiversity data in rural development programming

“…Other approaches combine agricultural statistics on extensive farming practices (livestock density and irrigated area) and crop diversity (Shannon's evenness index and crop richness) with spatially explicit data on landscape elements (natural constraints, arable area vs forest, Shannon's landscape diversity and evenness indices, edge density and others) at the local administrative unit (LAU) level (Lomba et al 2015). An example is the map of likely occurrence and distribution of HNV farmland in the Republic of Ireland at the electoral division level, which uses semi-natural habitat cover, stocking density, hedgerow density, river and stream density and soil diversity data (Matin et al 2016) (see Suppl.…”