Development and implementation of the Norwegian monitoring programme for agricultural landscapes

This paper describes the development and implementation of the Norwegian monitoring programme for agricultural landscapes—the ‘3Q programme’. The main objective of the scheme is to indicate development trends in the agricultural landscape, and their consequences for spatial structure, biodiversity, cultural heritage and accessibility. The monitoring programme aims to give policy feedback and provide data to fulfil international reporting requirements. This paper describes the background to the programme and reasons behind the choice of methods. Results are presented to show the accuracy of the methods employed and the range of indicator values recorded in the programme. Strengths and limitations of the monitoring programme are discussed, and potential future improvements and developments are outlined. Although there remains a potential for methodological improvement, we stress the importance of establishing a baseline to enable the detection of development trends in a rapidly changing environment.