Landscape perspectives for efficient conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in farmland

Project: Research

Project Details

Description

With a focus on pollinators in farmland, we will develop integrated economic-ecological modelling to evaluate benefits of policies with a landscape-scale approach. We ask if policies simultaneously affecting which interventions farmers implement and where they do it, increase their efficiency to simultaneously conserve rare bees and benefit crop pollination by wild bees. For Swedish farmland, we will determine the spatial scales that landscape composition affects inter- and intra-annual dynamics of bumblebee communities important as crop pollinators as well as determine regionally up-scaled effects of fragmentation of semi-natural habitat on bee species richness. We will use conceptual and mechanistic models to investigate consequences of spatially targeted agri-environmental policies on trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity conservation and ecosystem service provisioning. To this end we will extend a process-based model for crop pollination to account for pollinators differing in scale-dependent sensitivity to land-use and utility as crop pollinators and extend an agent-based land-use model to capture consequences of spatially targeted policies to preserve/restore semi-natural grasslands and create flower strips. Using integrated ecological-economic modelling, we will evaluate policy-scenarios that differ in spatial targeting of agri-environment measures between regions and farms on the simultaneous conservation of bee diversity and enhancement of crop pollination.
Short titleSynergies
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date2019/01/012021/12/31

Funding

  • FORMAS, The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning