Summary: overview and context
Farms are deeply embedded in wider landscape ecologies. Around half of all EU species depend on agricultural habitats for survival, yet two‑thirds of these habitats are classified as ecologically degraded. The combined effects of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation put billions in yields at risk every year. For example, annually, declining insects are responsible for over €15 billion in free pollination services while soil erosion costs farmers over a billion in direct losses. Ecosystem degradation on farmland also increases climate change impacts on infrastructure and society, especially extreme weather events. Unfortunately, rewilding and protected areas alone can't combat these issues (studies of German nature reserves indicate 75% insect declines since the 1990s). In response, the EU's Common Agricultural Policy increasingly emphasises more sustainable farming, and many EU countries have implemented or are considering collective land management approaches, to scale up positive impacts and leverage new technologies.
To support this, H2020 FRAMEwork was a five-year EU Horizon 2020 project (2020–2025) testing whether groups of neighbouring farmers, working collectively across farm boundaries, can meaningfully improve biodiversity and ecosystem services at landscape scale. Bringing together 18 consortium partners, the project established 11 Farmer Clusters in 10 countries, engaging over 120 farmers and implementing practical management changes across 240+ square kilometres of European farmland. Our project adopted a bottom-up approach that explored voluntary farmer collaboration, technical training, peer learning and community engagement, while giving weight to local priorities. This helped co-develop practical solutions, evidence and tools responding to current challenges. By fostering farming systems tailored to regional conditions and sustainability priorities, the project placed farmers and their communities at the centre of efforts to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services. Legacy dissemination continues via this website, our Recodo knowledge hub, consortium partner activity and some online channels until 2030.​
Cluster Network: what are Farmer Clusters?
The Farmer Cluster concept originated in England around 2010, growing out of a nature improvement area that happened to be farmer-led. FRAMEwork partner The Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust developed and formalised the approach. In Clusters, groups of neighbouring farmers, supported by a trained facilitator, agree to coordinate conservation and ecosystem management activities across their land. By 2020, Clusters covered over 450,000 hectares of UK farmland and had evolved into 'super clusters' and Environmental Farmers Groups, blending financing from public schemes with private sector and natural capital market opportunities. At this point, FRAMEwork was launched to trial the concept in the EU through a new pilot network.
​
The core idea is that biodiversity and ecosystem services aren't limited by farm boundaries, so their management shouldn't be either. Each group identifies priorities, whether on-farm or regional, and their facilitator coordinates action so it's joined up. In some countries they also manage access to, and implementation of, collective agri-environmental schemes, saving farmers paperwork and increasing the impact of measures. ​FRAMEwork set out to test whether the Farmer Cluster concept was flexible enough to work across continental Europe, establishing 11 pilot clusters, from northern Estonian to southern Spain, each with a locally recruited facilitator and a bottom-up structure in which local stakeholders defined their own agendas. To support wider adoption, the project produced best-practice guidelines, a free training course and an Info Hub for the pilot network and stakeholders interested in collective landscape-scale approaches.
Biodiversity Monitoring: how to optimise for farmland?
The project developed standardised but flexible biodiversity monitoring protocols for habitats, vegetation, insects and farmland birds, applied by specialist research teams across all 11 clusters to generate locally valuable baselines and cross-comparable data for the project’s wider research programme. Over 12,000 hectares of farmland were monitored, with more than 40,000 biodiversity observations recorded. Fieldwork encompassed 121 square kilometres surveyed, including 221 km of bird transects, 243 km of pollinator transects, 83,105 square metres of vegetation and 62,436 hours of pan-trapping amounting to 738 working days of field data collection. The Before-After-Control-Impact experimental design underpinning the monitoring approach was published as a standardised and replicable protocol, providing a practical legacy for future landscape-scale monitoring initiatives.
Teams recorded the difference in biodiversity between Cluster farm areas where measures were implemented and control farm areas. All resulting data is openly accessible through the project’s Data Hub, a metadata catalogue and data repository built on GeoNetwork and FAIR data principles. Alongside professional monitoring, the project invested heavily in Citizen Science approaches to biodiversity recording at scale, with 13,000 citizens taking part in 38 biodiversity monitoring events across nine countries. Through the project’s Biodiversity Observatory on iNaturalist, participants logged more than 10,000 observations and identified 2,190 species. Over 70 citizen science protocols developed and used by the project were published.
Agroecological Understanding: how to gain insights?
Research investigated drivers of biodiversity change in agricultural landscapes, including crop-habitat relationships, conservation biological control in integrated pest management, and the effects of land abandonment on arthropod and insect communities. Literature synthesis, meta-analyses and ecological modelling explored management impacts on agrobiodiversity across different farming systems, from Mediterranean olive groves and French apple orchards to northern European arable and grassland systems. These insights informed the identification of place-specific best-practice approaches to biodiversity-sensitive management, recognising that effective interventions vary significantly across biogeographical contexts. The project produced 40 academic publications across 22 journals, with work appearing in Nature Sustainability, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, BioScience, Nature Reviews Methods Primers, the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Journal of Applied Ecology and Agricultural Systems, among others.
Several practical tools were developed to support application of these research insights in the field. The FEAST decision-support tool helps land managers evaluate relationships between management practices, agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services, incorporating data and case studies from project clusters. FRAMEtest matches conservation actions to farm conditions within local economic and sustainable transition contexts. DigiFarms provide virtual landscape experiences visualising Clusters' agroecological info in local languages for farmers and agri-tourism, while a Sustainability Assessment Tool enables practitioners to evaluate farms across indicators. TAPIS supported data interoperability through alignment with existing standards.
Transition Pathways: how to catalyse progress?
The project investigated what motivates farmers, what barriers they face, and how policy and economic incentives shape land management decisions. Surveys and qualitative interviews across the cluster network identified factors that increase biodiversity appreciation as a driver of engagement, alongside practical and economic constraints on adopting new practices. A discrete choice experiment with 761 farmers found that 99.6 per cent preferred agri-environmental contracts offering the option to join a cluster. Experimental evidence showed collective result-based payments increase conservation efforts by 20 per cent compared with individual contracts. Natural asset profiling at one English cluster revealed that avoided soil erosion provides approximately £500 per hectare in production benefits, with soil conservation contributing to 28 per cent of crop production.
​
The project also examined how public and private incentive mechanisms could better support biodiversity-sensitive farming, including evaluation of existing agri-environment schemes and exploration of novel financing routes. FRAMEtest, a decision-support tool, was created to help stakeholders evaluate the cluster model in transition contexts such as organic conversion. Ten cluster-level policy briefs were published covering all 11 clusters, alongside three thematic briefs on private incentives, result-based payments and farmer engagement. The project’s overall approach was distilled into a ‘FRAMEwork System’ for biodiversity-sensitive farming, positioning cluster-based collaboration, monitoring, agroecological insight and supportive policy as interconnected drivers of landscape-scale change.