Conference Agenda

ID: 152 / 3.04.3: 2

Farmland Habitat Biodiversity

Talie Musavi¹, Marijn van der Velde¹, Marcel Schwieder², Christian Levers³, Momtchil Iordanov¹, Matteo Marcantonio¹, Stefan Erasmi²

1 European Commission - Joint Research Center, Ispra, Italy; 2 Thünen Institute for Farm Economics, Bundesalle 63, 38116 Braunschweig; 3 Thünen Institute for Biodiversity, Bundesalle 65, 38116 Braunschweig

Description: Agricultural expansion can destroy and fragment natural habitats, but agricultural areas if managed carefully, can still support biodiversity. The quality and biodiversity value of agricultural areas depends on factors such as land use intensity, composition, and configuration. Assessing biodiversity directly from space is challenging, but Earth Observation (EO) data can provide valuable insights into land use/cover or landscape structure (e.g., the new Copernicus HRL VLCC products), which can serve as proxies for habitat quality and biodiversity. By quantifying farmland habitat quality, conservation efforts can be targeted to protect, restore, and enhance these habitats, maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services. Indicator changes can inform farmers and policymakers where to focus on improving or where to maintain habitat quality (e.g. by developing and implementing sustainable agricultural practices). Nevertheless, there is still much to explore on how the available information could be utilized in extracting indicators that can help monitoring farmland biodiversity. Recently, the OECD has proposed a potential workflow for the development of a farmland habitat biodiversity indicator (FHBI) aiming to characterize farmland habitats on a national level based on already available monitoring data. At the workshop we want to discuss; current concepts of monitoring farmland biodiversity based on EO-data. Guiding questions include: how can we develop methods to convert land cover information into habitat quality indicators for biodiversity?, how such indicators can be upscaled and made comparable among different countries?, what are the recent advances in comparing EO-based habitat indicators in agricultural areas with biodiversity data?

Outcome: The workshop's goal is to establish a collaborative team that can take this research forward and explore its applications on broader scales and various contexts based on workshop outcomes.

Organization: We will have an introductory talk, including show cases and an interactive dashboard, and then we will split into break-out groups, where a specific question will be discussed at each table.