Abstract
Enhancing or retaining biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems is a key priority within the UK. The biodiversity of agricultural landscapes is determined by the spatial arrangement of land use types (such as arable, woodland, bioenery crop, set-aside etc), and this is in turn determined by the decisions that land managers make about how to manage their land, i.e. what to grow where. A previous Defra project (IF0137) identified management, agronomic and economic factors as those that had the greatest influence on the decisions of land managers. The aim of this project is to develop an integrated model to predict how the decisions made about land-use, based on economic, land characteristic, landscape and management factors, affect biodiversity within agroecosystems, with a focus on how economic incentives could be utilised to optimise biodiversity enhancement within agoecosystems.
United Kingdom