Looking upon constant decline: Monitoring High Nature Value Farmland in Germany

Modern farming is one of the main threats to biodiversity across large parts of Europe. To measure the success of programmes which aim to reduce adverse biodiversity effects of agriculture, indicators like the High Nature Value Farmland Indicator are implemented within the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU. HNV farmland is defined as extensively used agricultural land with elevated biodiversity, with semi-natural vegetation and/or with elevated structural diversity in the sense of landscape elements.
In Germany a targeted monitoring programme was developed to fulfil the EU reporting obligations regarding the HNV farmland indicator within the past programming period. A sample based monitoring programme was introduced in 2009 and operates since then. This programme allows to identify state and trends within the agricultural landscape in Germany and the federal states. Furthermore it allows to assess the state and the changes concerning biodiversity of the different land use types like grassland, arable and set aside or landscape elements like hedgerows, ditches or tall herb fringes. To date the currently used doubly stratified random sample comprises about 1300 sample plots of 1 km² each and allows to detect statistically significant trends. Monitoring is conducted in a 4 years cycle and indicator values are reported every second year by calculating the gliding mean. HNV farmland is assigned to three quality levels thus quality changes within HNV farmland can be detected. The monitoring programme is accompanied by a sophisticated quality management, comprising field trainings, field controls and exhausted quality controls of all field data.
The first results (fig. 1) provided new insights into the dynamics of the agricultural landscape and the changes of its biodiversity. To date the two largest components of HNV farmland in Germany are HNV grassland (45% of agricultural area) and landscape elements (34%). The results show a constant decline of HNV farmland between 2009 and 2015, with set aside and arable land showing the largest proportional declines. Regarding absolute figures the largest losses took place within HNV grassland.
Interestingly the main decrease takes place within the lowest quality level. That suggests that land parcels that were hitherto used less intensively than usual have recently been subject to stronger intensification. All trends described above are statistically significant. Landscape elements in contrast kept stable over the last 7 years
Due to the reporting obligations these findings are reflected directly to the regional, national and European agricultural policy area. It becomes evident that agri-environmental measures work well as far as they concern the protection of landscape elements within cross compliance, but that they face considerable shortcomings as far as the used agricultural surface is concerned. Therefore agri-environmental schemes must be subject to major improvements in this area.