Focus group meeting in France: How to increase farmland biodiversity?

On February 1st and 2nd, Dr. Maria Kernecker from the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) joined 19 experts from around Europe in Poitiers, France, to participate in the first meeting of the EU CAP Network Focus Group for enhancing the biodiversity on farmland through high-diversity landscape features.

The Focus Group will meet once again and produce a recommendations and outcomes report. Recommendations feed into future EU funding calls and EIP-AGRI Operational Groups.

This specific group focused on the question of how farmers can create and maintain high-diversity landscape features (HDLF) that positively impact farmland biodiversity. The specific tasks for the focus group included:

Identifying both challenges and opportunities for farmers in implementing HDLF to increase both the diversity and area of habitats and/or better connectivity between habitats.
Collecting and highlighting good practices, successful approaches and methodologies for implementing but also maintaining HDLF at different scales, from farm to landscape.
Identifying examples of how HDLF are socially and economically valued.
Identifying needs for capacity building in the implementation of HDLF.
Suggesting innovative HDLF and suitable maintenance/management models.
Identifying further research needs and possible gaps in technical knowledge.