Landscape-scale perennial flower field. Due to the collaboration of two farmers, more than 8 hectares of valuable habitats have been created in this landscape. (© Stefan Schüler)

By Stefan Schüler, Isabelle Arimond, Annika Hass, Tobias Plieninger, Menko Koch, Jule M. Huber, Volker Ruwisch, Manuel Bartens, and Catrin Westphal.

Read the full paper here.

To address the growing loss of biodiversity, landscape-scale approaches have shown promise in supporting both biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. These approaches depend on collaboration between farmers and other local actors. However, challenges like complex paperwork, high costs, and social tensions can make it hard for people to get involved. Based on a long-term collaborative landscape-scale project in Germany, we offer solutions to overcome these obstacles and promote collaboration at landscape scale. Key suggestions include building bridging structures across sectors to share ideas, involving regional facilitators to engage farmers and other actors, as well as addressing expectations of actors with regard to the support of administrative tasks and the exchange of information. This is especially important when local actors are not used to working together or when supportive governance structures are lacking. Our findings provide guidance for other initiatives that aim to engage multiple actors in landscape-scale efforts to conserve the biodiversity in agricultural landscapes collaboratively.