How Can Farmland Biodiversity Be Measured Consistently Across European Landscapes?

A new paper presents a standardised monitoring protocol tested across the project’s eleven Farmer Clusters…

A paper published in PLoS ONE by Nichols, Begg, Holland, Warner, McHugh, and colleagues presents a standardised protocol for measuring farmland biodiversity outcomes across European farmer-cluster landscapes. The protocol was developed and tested during the project, which established 11 farmer clusters across 9 countries and monitored their biodiversity using a Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) experimental design. The paper makes the full methodology available for replication in other farming systems and landscapes across Europe.

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What Does the Protocol Cover?

The protocol describes how to conduct biodiversity surveys of three taxonomic groups: birds, pollinators (bumblebees, butterflies, solitary bees and hoverflies) and vegetation. It provides guidance on selecting survey squares and transects that are representative of different farmland habitats within a landscape, and on adapting the approach to different farming systems — from arable land in central Europe to olive groves in the Mediterranean. The methods draw on well-documented individual procedures but combine them into a single standardised framework designed to produce comparable data across sites.

The BACI design is central. By comparing biodiversity on cluster farms before and after intervention with control sites where no coordinated management changes were made, the protocol isolates the effect of the cluster approach from background variation. This is what distinguishes it from simpler snapshot surveys and allows it to be used by other collective landscape-scale approaches, as it generates evidence of change attributable to the intervention rather than just a record of what was present.

Why is This Essential?

Farmland biodiversity monitoring across Europe currently lacks consistency. Different countries, projects and research groups use different methods, making it difficult to compare results or aggregate evidence across regions. A protocol that works in Estonian grasslands and Spanish olive groves alike, while remaining scientifically rigorous, addresses a gap that has limited the evidence base for agri-environment policy. Making progress on data standardisation and management is vital in an era of big data and AI.

For policymakers and practitioners considering the farmer cluster model, the protocol also offers a practical evaluation framework. Rather than relying on anecdotal reports of ecological improvement, new clusters adopting this protocol can generate data directly comparable to FRAMEwork’s five-year dataset. That comparability is what helps turn individual result sets into a growing European evidence base.

Read the full paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345691. Explore the FRAMEwork Data Hub for related datasets, or browse all FRAMEwork publications on the project website.