Estimating the cost of different strategies for measuring farmland biodiversity: Evidence from a Europe-wide field evaluation

Forty percent of the EU land area is currently considered to be agriculturally managed (utilised agricultural area – UAA – Eurostat Agricultural Census 2010), and attention to the environmental performance of farming practices is growing. To determine the performance of agricultural practices, farm-scale monitoring programmes are required but their implementation is hampered by a number of difficulties such as the identification of broadly applicable indicators appropriate for different biogeographic locations, and the evaluation of the effectiveness and costs of different monitoring approaches. In this paper, we focus on the costs of farm-scale biodiversity monitoring, presenting results from a Europe-wide cost data collection in the EU FP7 BioBio Project. Firstly, we present an analytical assessment of resources consumed by the research units and a cost estimation for the measurement of six biodiversity-related parameters: farm habitats, vegetation, wild bees and bumblebees, spiders, earthworms and farm management. Thereafter, we estimate a standardised cost for an ordinary measurement of the six parameters at farm-scale. In doing so, we highlight the cost differences between three strategies involving different potential actors (professional agencies, farmers, volunteers). This analysis demonstrates that producing reliable data on monitoring costs requires a large sample pool of farms and farm types, as was the case in the BioBio project. The cost standardisation allowed us to estimate a cost for biodiversity monitoring ranging between €2700 and €8200 per farm, depending on the chosen strategy.