How can we monitor Europe-wide farmland biodiversity so that it makes sense to farmers, is ecologically credible and scientifically sound and can be implemented for a reasonable price? These are the questions two new studies by researchers from institutes in France and Switzerland have attempted to answer.

Researchers behind two studies recently published in the Journal of Applied Ecology and the Journal of Environmental Management have outlined their plans for creating a monitoring scheme that will be able to assess farmland biodiversity and guide conservation work.

To design the monitoring scheme, stakeholders were asked which indicators provided best "value for money" (to deliver cost-effective monitoring of species which are indicative of overall health in an ecosystem). Habitat, plant species and farm management indicators ranked highest. Wild bees, earthworms and spiders as important providers of ecosystem services came next. Together, the researchers said, they form a minimum set of indicators which provides useful information and which can make dominant changes in farmland biodiversity visible.

Researchers from the FP7 funded EU projects "Biodiversity Indicators for European Farming Systems (BioBio)" and "Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON)", then developed cost estimates for nine monitoring scenarios and the authors conclude that a continent-wide farmland biodiversity monitoring scheme would be ‘modestly’ priced, requiring only a small share of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) budget (2014-2020).

Cost assessments showed that the farmland biodiversity monitoring programmes would require 0·01% - 0·74% of the total CAP budget (or 0·04% - 2·48% of CAP funds allocated to environmental targets). With 30% of the CAP devoted to environmental targets (more than €120 billion), investing in a monitoring process seems a logical choice, the assessors said.

Making the case for better monitoring, Dr. Ilse Geijzendorffer, lead author of one of the papers, said, ”Despite scientific proof that monitoring increases the [cost] efficiency of policy measures, monitoring rarely gets included in policy programme budgets. We identified that the cost are not as high as feared. To further facilitate implementation, the study provides stepping stones to build a European monitoring scheme, offering a choice in indicators and using regions as a unit of trend analysis.”

The researchers said their framework for individual countries to start farmland biodiversity monitoring, will build towards a coherent European picture of biodiversity.