How Can Biodiversity Measures Fit Farms and Landscapes?

A new report introduces a decision support tool that matches conservation actions to individual farm conditions and important wider contexts

FRAMEwork has released a technical report describing FRAMEselect, a decision-support tool designed to help farmer clusters choose biodiversity management actions suited to specific farm businesses and landscape contexts. The report privudes the tool's full documentation from development to-date. It addresses a gap familiar to anyone who has tried to implement agri-environment schemes at landscape scale: generic guidance rarely fits individual farms, and what works on one holding may be counterproductive on another.

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How the Tool Works

FRAMEselect runs through four steps. It establishes baseline biodiversity conditions from standardised surveys and existing farm data. It identifies conservation priorities specific to the cluster's landscape. It evaluates management options against those priorities using spatial analysis and ecological models. It then presents farmers with tailored recommendations, highlighting which actions offer the greatest conservation return relative to cost and disruption.

The spatial element matters. Some farms sit at key points in habitat corridors or host rare species. Others have soil conditions that favour particular interventions. FRAMEselect accounts for these differences rather than treating every holding the same. For cluster-level or landscape-scale decisions, this means coordinators can see where effort is best concentrated across multiple farms to build connected habitat networks.

Tested with real farmers

The tool went through two rounds of testing with FRAMEwork's farmer clusters across several European countries. Beta testing with a small group identified refinements to the interface and ecological models. Gamma testing with broader cluster participation checked whether the recommendations were practical and made sense to working farmers. The report documents both rounds, including where the tool's suggestions had to be adjusted to match farming realities that the models initially missed.

Additionally, the tool is being further developed to provide advisors and policymakers with capabilities to assess not only measures at specific scales, but also measures within broader collective and transition contexts such as transitions to organic farming practices that were recently encourage by the EU’s lates CAP.

Download the report here: https://zenodo.org/records/13781590. See all FRAMEwork tools at https://www.framework-biodiversity.eu/resources and publications at https://www.framework-biodiversity.eu/publications.