Service contract to support follow-up actions to the mid-term review of the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020 in relation to target 3A - Agriculture : final report

Agriculture is the predominant land-use in the EU and there is robust evidence that there are widespread declines in farmland biodiversity in agricultural areas. The drivers of these declines therefore need to be identified and addressed if the EU is to achieve its target of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2020. A variety of studies have indicated that farmland biodiversity declines are often the result of changes in agricultural systems and practices, including increased intensification and specialisation in many areas, or, in contrast, agricultural abandonment in others. However, further detailed evidence is required of the relationships between agriculture and biodiversity, across a wider range of agricultural habitats, species groups and Member States to reliably inform agricultural and other land-use policy responses. To help to address this evidence gap, this study has been carried out with the objective of elaborating and applying an evidence-based methodology for analysing potential causal links between the state of biodiversity and certain agricultural management practices in the EU. This requires the development of an analytical framework that is sufficiently flexible to be applicable to multiple taxa or elements of biodiversity (such as indices describing communities of various groups of organisms, via empirical data or proxies such as habitat condition) and their responses to environmental variation in space and time.