A brief review of existing definitions, typologies, and data sources for quantification

Agricultural landscape features are small fragments of natural or semi-natural vegetation in agricultural land which, compared to their relatively small size, provide important contributions to ecosystem services and biodiversity. They have long-standing historical and cultural roots in the agricultural landscapes of Europe, but with the advent of intensive agriculture, landscape features became threatened. Nevertheless, landscape features can have a major role in making European agriculture more resilient to the key environmental challenges of the 21st century, including climate change and biodiversity decline. One of the critical difficulties for protecting, restoring, or monitoring landscape features in agricultural areas is the lack of a harmonised understanding on its definition and main types. Operative assessment and monitoring require an EU-level harmonized methodology, tightly linked to the ecological functions of landscape features (i.e., the characteristics underlying their capacity to provide ecosystem services) in order to ensure that the resulting indicators will respond to the fundamental policy goals. In this report we provide an overview on the various ways how the concept of landscape features is present in EU policy documents, and the available datasets that can provide consistent information at the EU-level.

CZUCZ Balint;  BARUTH Bettina;  TERRES Jean-Michel;  GALLEGO PINILLA Francisco;  HAGYO Andrea;  ANGILERI Vincenzo;  NOCITA Marco;  PEREZ-SOBA AGUILAR Marta;  KOEBLE Renate;  PARACCHINI Maria-Luisa; 

2022-03-16

Publications Office of the European Union

JRC128297

978-92-76-47818-8 (online),   

1831-9424 (online),   

EUR 30997 EN,    OP KJ-NA-30997-EN-N (online),   

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128297,   

10.2760/59418 (online),