Spatial Arrangement of Action-Oriented Versus Hybrid Agri-Environmental Schemes: Implications for Grassland Ecosystem Services

Abstract

The potential of agri-environmental measures to create synergies among biodiversity and ecosystem services while accounting for the trade-off with food production are still  overlooked. This paper aims to understand (i) the role of landscape-scale environmental conditions for differently designed agri-environmental measures for biodiversity conservation, and (ii) how the spatial heterogeneity in spatial conditions can be exploited to reduce trade-offs with agricultural production. We focused on climate regulation and pollination and forage production in permanent grasslands in the canton of Solothurn (Switzerland). We analysed the current and a more targeted alternative spatial distribution of extensive grasslands targeted by the agri-environmental schemes based on potential cold- and hotspots of the ecosystem services.Extensive grasslands, especially enrolled in hybrid schemes, were predominantly situated on relatively marginal land compared to intensively managed grasslands. Yet, differences were observed between pastures (mostly grazed grasslands) and meadows (mostly mown). We found that both schemes could create more synergies besides biodiversity conservation, because extensive grasslands, irrespective of whether this was achieved via an action-oriented or hybrid agri-environmental scheme, were only partly situated on hotspots for regulating services. While pastures under the two agri-environmental schemes substantially overlapped with hotspots of regulating services, this overlap was much lower for extensive meadows, especially the ones targeted by the purely action-oriented scheme. In addition, a large proportion of especially the action-oriented extensive meadows overlapped with yield hotspots, resulting in considerable trade-offs with food production. Consequently, our study implies that spatial targeting of biodiversity conservation schemes should be refined to enhance their effectiveness and to reduce trade-offs. Improved spatial targeting of agri-environmental schemes, especially the action-oriented ones, has the potential to increase the supply of regulating ecosystem services and minimize the reduction in provisioning ecosystem services. Yet, such re-allocation should be grounded in the selection of landscape settings that also support high biodiversity.

Keywords: Agri-environmental schemes, action-based, results-based, Biodiversity conservation, Ecosystem Services, spatial mismatches