Anna Cord

University of Bonn | Uni Bonn · Agro-ecological Modeling

Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings, but the management and analyses of these raw data present technical challenges. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can fulfil all purposes required for the management, processing, navigation, and analysis of acoustic data. The field...

The decline of segetal flora species across Europe, driven by intensified agricultural practices, is impacting other taxa and ecosystem functions. Result-based payments to farmers offer an effective solution to conserve these species, but the high cost of biodiversity monitoring remains a challenge. In this study, we conducted UAV flights with an R...

Grasslands are key for food security and provide important ecosystem services. Intensive management, such as frequent mowing, increases productivity but decreases other ecosystem services as well as plant biodiversity. We here estimate large scale effects of mowing frequency on plant species richness and provide spatial assessments of yield-species...

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional uncertainty, and sampling b...

The adoption of agri-environment practices (AEPs) is crucial for safeguarding the long-term sustainability of ecosystem services within European agricultural landscapes. However, the tailoring of agri-environment policies to the unique characteristics of farming systems is a challenging task, often neglecting local farm parameters or requiring exte...

The need for remote, reliable, and scalable monitoring of plummeting biodiversity amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems and changing climate has sparked enormous interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) over multiple disciplines and ecosystems. Even though PAM could support UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Biodiversity I...

Context Agricultural intensification is a major driver of farmland biodiversity declines. However, the relationship between land-use intensity (LUI) and biodiversity is complex and difficult to characterise, not least because of the difficulties in accurately quantifying LUI across heterogeneous agricultural regions. Objectives We investigated how...

Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) are the main policy tool to counteract farmland biodiversity declines in Europe, but their biodiversity benefit varies across sites and is likely moderated by landscape context. Systematic monitoring of AES outcomes is lacking, and AES assessments are often based on field experiments encompassing one or few study si...

The global expansion and intensification of food production threaten biodiversity, vital for ecosystem services and food security. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) advocates drastic changes in agricultural management, yet translating recommendations into local action is challenging. Biodiversity-friendly practices carry high...

Species distribution models (SDMs) have proven valuable in filling gaps in our knowledge of species occurrences. However, despite their broad applicability, SDMs exhibit critical shortcomings due to limitations in species occurrence data. These limitations include, in particular, issues related to sample size, positional error, and sampling bias. I...

This deliverable provides an overview of the methods and data used for developing the Farming System Archetypes (FSAs) in the five case studies - Humber, Mulde, SouthMoravia, Bačka and Catalonia. Additionally, it discusses limitations as well as problems and presents solutions. The FSAs are a generalized typology of farming systems that are assumed...

This document is the first version of the Data Management Plan of the H2020 BESMAP project. The Data Management Plan is intended as a living document and updated versions of this document will be produced in month 18 (D1.4) and month 36 (D1.6). The scope of the Data Management Plan is to describe the data management life cycle of all data sets that...

This document describes the interrelationships between the ecosystem services, biodiversity and socio-economic outputs modelled in the Work Package 3 (WP3), to identify bundles of co-occurring services. Furthermore, this document presents an analysis of how different types of Agri-Environmental Measures (AEM) drive trade-offs and synergies among di...

This deliverable provides a General Framework for the BESTMAP Policy Impact Assessment Modelling (BESTMAP-PIAM) toolset. An update of the framework will be provided later in the project in Deliverable 2.4. The BESTMAP-PIAM is based on the notion of defining (a) a typology of agricultural systems, with one (or more) representative case study (CS) in...

This deliverable provides a report on the biodiversity and ecosystem services (ESS) models as well as the socio-economic statistical model, generated in the Work Package 3 (WP3) - Farming System Archetypes of BESTMAP. A general overview of the research goals and guiding principles under which the models were developed is given, followed by a detail...

The intensification of agriculture through the application of high fertilization rates is leading to the decline ofwild arable herbs with significant natural value (HNV). This decline, in turn, is having a series of adverseecological consequences. One approach to encourage the preservation of HNV wild arable herbs is to implementresult-based paymen...

Result‐based payments (RBPs) reward land users for conservation outcomes and are a promising alternative to standard payments, which are targeted at specific land use measures. A major barrier to the implementation of RBPs, particularly for the conservation of mobile species, is the substantial monitoring cost. Passive acoustic monitoring may offer...

Modeling the past or future spread patterns of invasive plant species is challenging and in an ideal case requires multi-temporal and spatially explicit data on the occurrences of the target species as well as information on the habitat suitability of the areas at risk of being invaded. Most studies either focus on modeling the habitat suitability...

Context Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) were designed as part of the greening strategy of the common agricultural policy to conserve biodiversity in European farmland, prevent soil erosion and improve soil quality. Farmers receive economic support if they dedicate at least 5% of their arable farmland to any type of EFA, which can be selected from a l...

There is a lack of guidance on the choice of the spatial grain of predictor and response variables in species distribution models (SDM). This review summarizes the current state of the art with regard to the following points: (i) the effects of changing the resolution of predictor and response variables on model performance; (ii) the effect of cond...

Managing agricultural land to maximize the supply of natural pest control can help reduce pesticide use. Tools that are able to represent the relationship between landscape structure, field management and natural pest control can help in deciding which management practices should be used and where. However, the reliability and the predictive power...

Result-based payments (RBPs) reward land users for conservation outcomes and are a promising alternative to standard payments, which are targeted at specific land use measures. A major barrier to the implementation of RBPs, particularly for the conservation of mobile species, is the substantial monitoring cost. Passive acoustic monitoring may offer...

Developing spatially-targeted policies for farmland in the European Union (EU) requires synthesized, spatially-explicit knowledge of agricultural systems and their environmental conditions. Such synthesis needs to be flexible and scalable in a way that allows the generalization of European landscapes and their agricultural potential into spatial un...

Ecosystem structure, especially vertical vegetation structure, is one of the six essential biodiversity variable classes and is an important aspect of habitat heterogeneity, affecting species distributions and diversity by providing shelter, foraging, and nesting sites. Point clouds from airborne laser scanning (ALS) can be used to derive such deta...

Agri-environmental schemes (AES) belong to the main instruments of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to foster sustainable farming practices that contribute to the conservation of biodiversity, ecosystem services, climate change mitigation and adaptation. Farmers’ attitudes towards these voluntary measures and the socio-economic...

Agri‐environment schemes (AESs), ecological focus areas (EFAs), and organic farming are the main tools of the common agricultural policy (CAP) to counteract the dramatic decline of farmland biodiversity in Europe. However, their effectiveness is repeatedly doubted because it seems to vary when measured at the field‐versus‐landscape level and to dep...

1. Biodiversity loss in European agricultural landscapes is progressing rapidly despite a growing number of conservation efforts. One of the reasons for this is that farmers do not have enough decision-making power and do not receive adequate advice to tailor conservation measures to local conditions and regional biodiversity targets. 2. In this...

The performance of species distribution models (SDMs) is known to be affected by analysis grain and positional error of species occurrences. Coarsening of the analysis grain has been suggested to compensate for positional errors. Nevertheless, this way of dealing with positional errors has never been thoroughly tested. With increasing use of fine‐s...

Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) are considered keystone species and ecosystem engineers for their grazing and burrowing activities (summarized here as disturbances). As climate changes and its variability increases, the mechanisms underlying organisms' interactions with their habitat will likely shift. Understanding the mediating role of prairie dog dis...

Due to the difficulty of capturing spatially explicit information on cultural ecosystem services (CES), previous studies have paid less attention to their relationships with other services. In this study, we quantified the relationships between selected CES using crowdsourced photographs, carbon storage and species richness of plants and butterflie...

Accurate modelling of changes in freshwater supplies is critical in an era of increasing human demand, and changes in land use and climate. However, there are concerns that current landscape-scale models do not sufficiently capture catchment-level changes, whilst large-scale comparisons of empirical and simulated water yield changes are lacking. He...

Land-use intensification in agroecosystems has led to population declines in many taxonomic groups, especially farmland birds. Two contrasting conservation strategies have therefore been proposed: land sharing (the integration of biodiversity conservation in low-intensity agriculture) and land sparing (the spatial separation of high-yielding agricu...

This deliverable provides a General Framework for the BESTMAP Policy Impact Assessment Modelling (BESTMAP-PIAM) toolset. The BESTMAP-PIAM is based on the notion of defining (a) a typology of agricultural systems, with one (or more) representative case study (CS) in each major system; (b) mapping all individual farms within the case study to a Farm...

Social-ecological interactions have been shown to generate interrelated and reoccurring sets of ecosystem services, also known as ecosystem service bundles. Given the potential utility of the bundles concept, along with the recent surge in interest it is timely to reflect on the concept, its current use and potential for the future. Based on our ec...

Global frameworks to guide consistent monitoring of changes in human–nature interactions across space and time are needed to better understand how healthy ecosystems support societies and to inform policy design. Monitoring Essential Ecosystem Service Variables (EESVs) can provide a comprehensive picture of how links between nature and people are c...

1. Prairie dogs (Cynomys sp.) are considered keystone species and ecosystem engineers for their grazing and burrowing activities (summarized here as disturbances). As climate changes and its variability increases, the mechanisms underlying organisms’ interactions with their habitat will likely shift. Understanding the mediating role of prairie dog...

This document is the first version of the Guidelines and protocols harmonizing activities across case studies of the H2020 BESTMAP project. It is intended to be updated in month 40 (D1.8).

Despite some partial successes, the loss of biological diversity and the ecosystem services that depend on it ("natural capital") is progressing rapidly. In particular, there is a lack of broad implementation of existing policy instruments and measures in agriculture. The reasons for this often lie in a lack of acceptance and obstacles that farmers...

The management and use of cultural landscapes in Europe has intensified during the last century. So-called multifunctional landscapes (i.e. those providing a diverse set of ecosystem functions and services) gradually transformed into more specialized and uniform landscapes (i.e. providing fewer ecosystem functions and services). Since the loss of e...

A key sustainability challenge in human-dominated landscapes is how to reconcile competing demands such as food production, water quality, climate regulation, and ecological amenities. Prior research has documented how efforts to prioritize desirable ecosystem services such as food and fiber have often led to tradeoffs with other services. However,...

Extraction of minerals through mining is essential for industrial and societal development. However, mining activities and catastrophic mining accidents across the globe have caused severe environmental impacts. Here we call for an urgent paradigm shift and outline a new vision, published in the Science Policy Report “A new vision of sustainable ma...

Functional traits offer promising avenues to investigate how community composition and diversity define ecosystem functioning and service delivery. In recent years, many empirical studies on the importance of functional traits for ecosystem service provisioning have been undertaken, but a general understanding and synthesis of results is lacking fo...

Half of the European Union (EU) land and the livelihood of 10 million farmers is threatened by unsustainable land-use intensification, land abandonment and climate change. Policy instruments, including the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) have so far failed to stop this environmental degradation. BESTMAP will: 1) Develop a behavioural theoretica...

The effects of habitat loss on the distribution of populations are often linked with species specialization degree. Specialist species can be more affected by changes in landscape structure and local patch characteristics compared to generalist species. Moreover, the spatial scale at which different land covers (eg. habitat, cropland, urban areas)...

Lake Urmia has experienced severe environmental degradation, mainly characterized by the enormous reduction of its surface area and water level. This issue has been mainly attributed to land-use and land-cover changes, in particular related to agricultural expansion and intensification. In this study, we used the DPSIR framework (D: driving forces,...

Multifunctional landscapes are used and shaped by a range of different stakeholders. The high number of diverging values, interests or demands in such landscapes can lead to conflicts that impact sustainability goals. In this study, our aim was to include stakeholders’ valuations of ecosystem services in multifunctionality assessments and thereby t...

Mountain ecosystems are biodiversity hotspots that are increasingly threatened by climate and land use/land cover changes. Long-term biodiversity monitoring programs provide unique insights into resulting adverse impacts on plant and animal species distribution. Species distribution models (SDMs) in combination with satellite remote sensing (SRS) d...

Multifunctionality refers to the capacity of an area to supply multiple ecosystem functions or services. While many conceptual and methodological advances have focused on defining and quantifying multifunctionality, the challenge of dealing with cross-scale dynamics of multifunctionality remains open. This study proposes a new way of measuring mult...

Multifunctional landscapes are typically characterized by diversified land use and complex landscape structure, thereby potentially covering many, often competing interests of different stakeholder groups. Central to the concept of multifunctionality is the assumption that this supply of a more diverse set of (market and non-market) goods leads to...

Extraction and use of minerals through mining is essential for industrial and societal development. However, the mining industry carries significant risks of long-lasting negative impacts on the environment, particularly on water resources and landscapes, as well as on local communities. Catastrophies such as the Brumadinho dam collapse in Brazil i...

Empirical research on land sharing and land sparing has been criticized because preferences of local stake-holders, socioeconomic aspects, a bundle of ecosystem services and the local context were only rarely integrated. Using storylines and scenarios is a common approach to include land use drivers and local contexts or to cope with the uncertaint...

A growing human population coupled with increasing per capita consumption, changing diets, increasing food waste, and ineffective regulation, have led to rising demands on ecosystems for the services they supply [1].

The benefits nature provides to people, called ecosystem services, are increasingly recognized and accounted for in assessments of infrastructure development, agricultural management, conservation prioritization, and sustainable sourcing. These assessments are often limited by data, however, a gap with tremendous potential to be filled through Eart...

Scientists and decision-makers need tools that can assess which specific pressures lead to ecosystem deterioration, and which measures could reduce these pressures and/or limit their effects. In this context, species distribution models are tools that can be used to help asses these pressures. Evolutionary algorithms represent a collection of promi...

Efforts are increasing to integrate the sustainable provision of ecosystem services into land management decision-making. These efforts, however, are challenged by (1) the variety of methods to map and quantify ecosystem services, and (2) the scarcity of knowledge on how environmental policies and management decisions affect relationships among eco...

Which ecosystem services are addressed? Timber production, crop production, crops for bioenergy use, livestock production, water quality regulation, recreation, erosion control, pollination, nitrogen retention, flood regulation

Spatiotemporal ecological modelling of terrestrial ecosystems relies on climatological and biophysical Earth observations. Due to their increasing availability, global coverage, frequent acquisition and high spatial resolution, satellite remote sensing (SRS) products are frequently integrated to in situ data in the development of ecosystem models (...

Recent 'New Conservation' approaches called for more ecosystem services (ES) emphasis in conservation. We analysed data from 3757 Natura 2000 special protection areas (SPAs) and translated positive and negative impacts listed by conservation managers into indicators of the use of nine provisioning, regulating and cultural ES. Overall, the use of ES...

Assessing species richness and diversity on the basis of standardised field sampling effort represents a cost- and time-consuming method. Satellite remote sensing (RS) can help overcome these limitations because it facilitates the collection of larger amounts of spatial data using cost-effective techniques. RS information is hence increasingly anal...

Pearsons’s correlation coefficients between the test variables (a) and remaining variables after removing variables with coefficients │c│≥ 0.7 (b). (DOCX)

Pearsons’s correlation coefficients for all pairs of remaining test variable and distance class (100 and 1000 m). (DOCX)

Differences between years (upper two rows) and locations (lower two rows) within the biodiversity variables per data set (df). (DOCX)

Spline correlograms for the global fitted models as per model selection for each response variable of (a) the bumble-bees data set (bb), (b) the solitary-bees data set (sb), and (c) the wild bee data set (nohb). (DOCX)

Workflow of the study. (DOCX)