Assessing the recreational demand for agricultural land in Finland

It is widely assumed that the scenic attractiveness and other public good aspects of agricultural land can be utilized as a source of livelihood in rural areas in the form of recreation and tourism. In this study we use two approaches to consider whether agricultural landscapes are preferred as a destination for recreation (day trips) and rural tourism (overnight trips). We first analyse the choice of recreation site type based on a model that aggregates sites using the presence of agricultural land as an aggregation variable. Population survey data on recreation trips reveal an association between the respondent’s living environment, recreational activities and visit characteristics and the probability of choosing a destination with agricultural land. Second, we also estimate the demand functions for trips to agricultural sites and other destination types to consider whether the presence of agricultural land, as opposed to other land use categories, increases the number of trips and the benefits of recreation. The results suggest that agricultural landscapes are inferior to alternative site types in terms of per-trip benefits. However, agricultural landscapes are associated with high annual benefits because of the high rate of visitation

How much do we really lose?—Yield losses in the proximity of natural landscape elements in agricultural landscapes

Natural landscape elements (NLEs) in agricultural landscapes contribute to biodiversity and ecosystem services, but are also regarded as an obstacle for large‐scale agricultural production. However, the effects of NLEs on crop yield have rarely been measured. Here, we investigated how different bordering structures, such as agricultural roads, field‐to‐field borders, forests, hedgerows, and kettle holes, influence agricultural yields. We hypothesized that (a) yield values at field borders differ from mid‐field yields and that (b) the extent of this change in yields depends on the bordering structure. We measured winter wheat yields along transects with log‐scaled distances from the border into the agricultural field within two intensively managed agricultural landscapes in Germany (2014 near Göttingen, and 2015–2017 in the Uckermark). We observed a yield loss adjacent to every investigated bordering structure of 11%–38% in comparison with mid‐field yields. However, depending on the bordering structure, this yield loss disappeared at different distances. While the proximity of kettle holes did not affect yields more than neighboring agricultural fields, woody landscape elements had strong effects on winter wheat yields. Notably, 95% of mid‐field yields could already be reached at a distance of 11.3 m from a kettle hole and at a distance of 17.8 m from hedgerows as well as forest borders. Our findings suggest that yield losses are especially relevant directly adjacent to woody landscape elements, but not adjacent to in‐field water bodies. This highlights the potential to simultaneously counteract yield losses close to the field border and enhance biodiversity by combining different NLEs in agricultural landscapes such as creating strips of extensive grassland vegetation between woody landscape elements and agricultural fields. In conclusion, our results can be used to quantify ecocompensations to find optimal solutions for the delivery of productive and regulative ecosystem services in heterogeneous agricultural landscapes

Distant agricultural landscapes

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11625-014-0278-0This paper examines the relationship between the development of the dominant industrial food system and its associated global economic drivers and the environmental sustainability of agricultural landscapes. It makes the case that the growth of the global industrial food system has encouraged increasingly complex forms of “distance” that separate food both geographically and mentally from the landscapes on which it was produced. This separation between food and its originating landscape poses challenges for the ability of more localized agricultural sustainability initiatives to address some of the broader problems in the global food system. In particular, distance enables certain powerful actors to externalize ecological and social costs, which in turn makes it difficult to link specific global actors to particular biophysical and social impacts felt on local agricultural landscapes. Feedback mechanisms that normally would provide pressure for improved agricultural sustainability are weak because there is a lack of clarity regarding responsibility for outcomes. The paper provides a brief illustration of these dynamics with a closer look at increased financialization in the food system. It shows that new forms of distancing are encouraged by the growing significance of financial markets in global agrifood value chains. This dynamic has a substantial impact on food system outcomes and ultimately complicates efforts to scale up small-scale local agricultural models that are more sustainable.The Trudeau Foundation || Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Integrating ecological and economic aspects in land use concepts for agricultural landscapes

Especially in environmentally sensitive agricultural landscapes, agriculture cannot define its aims by itself - it has to account for a number of demands of different groups of society. For example, agriculture is expected to produce food and at the same time contribute to the protection of cultural landscapes and to further ecological services. Land use concepts for ecologically particularly sensitive agricultural landscapes are often focussed on the attainment of specific environmental objectives in specific areas, neglecting both socioeconomic effects, in particular income effects, and the farmers' income-driven production responses outside these areas. The paper illustrates, on the basis of an empirical study, (1) that the farmers' objectives and production responses need to be integrated in land use concepts for agricultural landscapes because of their potentially counterproductive effects on the attainment of environmental objectives, and (2) how multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) can be used to transform a primarily ecology-oriented concept for an ecologically very sensitive agricultural landscape into a more comprehensive one that makes due allowance for the farmers’ responses and society's socio-economic objectives. The authors show that the integration of socio-economic objectives can contribute to the maintenance of incomes and employment without overly harming the attainment of ecological goals. Finally, the paper discusses policy implications resulting from the implementation of land use concepts for agricultural landscapes, in particular in the field of agri-environmental policy, and raises some practical issues that come up if policy makers apply MCDA more widely in the design of such concepts.agricultural landscapes, land-use concepts, multi-criteria decision analysis, Land Economics/Use, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Ground beetle dispersal: how to bridge the scales?

Beneficial arthropods that provide biological control of aphids or weed seeds use a variety of habitats in agricultural landscapes. Information on the movement behaviour of these arthropods between these habitats is needed to develop conservation strategies that sustain pest suppression in agricultural landscapes. Models for movement behaviour may help to understand and explore biocontrol functions. As measurements of behaviour at the landscape scale are technically difficult to make, measurements are often made at smaller scales. It is then necessary to upscale to larger scales, using movement models. Here we present a case study on such upscaling. The first results indicate that upscaling from small scales to large scales, using a correlated random movement model, may result in errors. An alternative approach, to be tested in further work, is to fit the movement model directly to the large scale dat

Valuing the Benefits of Preserving Agricultural Landscapes: A Meta-Analysis of Stated Preference studies

Agricultural landscapes provide us with multiple ecosystem services, including provisioning services like crops; regulatory services like pest control, nutrient cycling, water quality management and pollination as well as cultural services like recreation, aesthetic beauty and habitats for wildlife. Many of these include non-market goods and services which are not traded in the market and lack market prices. Thus, environmental valuation studies using Revealed (RP) and Stated Preference (SP) methods are needed to value them, which can then provide the right incentives for optimal economic management of these landscapes. This thesis reviews and analyzes published SP studies worldwide in the last 15 years (2007-2022) that have used either Choice Experiment (CE) or Contingent Valuation (CV) methods to value agricultural landscapes. A meta-analysis of 17 primary SP studies with 189 estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) for agricultural landscapes across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and North America was performed to see what characteristics of the landscape, the valuation method used and the affected population determine people's (WTP) for preserving agricultural landscapes. It was also compared to an existing meta-analysis of older studies (1982 – 2008) to see whether the drivers of WTP had changed in the last 15 years. Results indicate that society’s willingness to pay (WTP) for agricultural landscapes is influenced by the size of the valued changes in landscapes, recreational services, the choice experiment (CE) valuation method, current condition of the landscape and other relevant variables. Landscape attributes such as the scarcity of agricultural lands, the direction (i.e., avoiding degradation or getting improvements) and their ecosystem services strongly influence people's preferences and WTP. Contrary to the existing meta-analysis, no significant results indicated that GDP per capita influences people's willingness to pay for agricultural landscapes. The findings provide valuable insights into the complex factors shaping people's preferences for agricultural landscapes

Paying for Biodiversity Conservation Services in Agricultural Landscapes

Adoption of improved silvopastoral practices in degraded pasture areas is thought to provide valuable local and global environmental benefits, including biodiversity conservation, However, these practices are insufficiently attractive to individual land users for them to adopt them spontaneously, particularly due to their high initial costs. This paper describes the contract mechanism developed for the Regional Integrated Silvopastoral Ecosystem Management Project, which is being implemented with financing from the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The project is testing the use of the payment-for-service mechanism to encourage the adoption of silvopastoral practices in three countries of Central and South America: Colombia, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua. The project has created a mechanism that pays land users for the global environmental services they are generating, so that the additional income stream makes the proposed practices privately profitable. Designing the mechanism required addressing issues such as (1) measuring the actual amount of environmental services being provided, so that appropriate payments can be made; (2) providing payments in a way that resulted in the desired change in land use; and (3) avoiding the creation of perverse incentives (for example, for land users to cut down existing trees so as to qualify for additional payments for tree planting). Two variants of the proposed payment mechanism are being tested, with participating land users assigned randomly to one or the other. The project also includes extensive monitoring of the effectiveness of each mechanism in stimulating adoption of the proposed measures and of the resulting impact on environmental services and on household welfare. These features, together with the three-country approach, will provide in the coming years a very rich dataset for testing the use of contract mechanisms for biodiversity conservation.Payments for Environmental Services, Contract design, Biodiversity, Conservation, Silvopastoral, Agroforestry

Arresting woodland bird decline in Australian agricultural landscapes: potential application of the European agri-environment model

This paper considered the applicability of the European model of land stewardship payments, in particular its support for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes, to an Australian context. More broadly, the research approach described in the paper may also be applied to assessing the suitability of overseas stewardship schemes to the provision of any ecoservice in Australia, such as carbon sequestration and floodwater regulation

Agroforestry component in formation and functioning of current agricultural landscapes

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