Abstract
Farmland birds have been declining rapidly during the last 30 years as a result of intensified agriculture. The EU has promoted Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) to mitigate this biodiversity loss, but so far with limited success. A major obstacle for a successful AES is the lack of communication between policy makers, conservationists and farmers, making steps between planning and action inefficient. This lack of mutual understanding thus hinders the development and implementation of post-2010 targets for sustainable farming. We aim to improve this situation in close dialogue with farmers, and together design, implement and assess measures to enhance farmland biodiversity. We will do this by research in a model system for the conservation of farmland bird biodiversity: ´The Volunteer & Farmer Alliance (Sweden)´ including more than 250 farms across Sweden. We will (1) assess the links between local biodiversity, farmer attitudes towards policy targets, farming practices and landscape structure to identify ´bottlenecks´ for implementation, (2) study the role of advisory encounters and farming intensity for the farmers willingness to perform conservation measures, and (3) develop efficient conservation measures that both enhance biodiversity and farmers voluntary willingness to implement these measures.
Sweden