Farmer acceptable Restoration of Habitats (FRESHH)

Pesticide use and agricultural intensification have degraded biodiversity and landscapes. In parallel, the diversity of semi-natural habitats has declined drastically. However, these are important for biodiversity, not least because animals that provide biological regulation of weeds and pests in fields find retreat habitats there. In addition, increased transport of chemicals has adverse effects on the ecological status and diversity of adjacent aquatic habitats. This project will investigate whether reducing chemical use and restoring semi-natural habitats in rural areas can foster natural biodiversity in both farmland and aquatic habitats. Reducing pesticide application is a risk for farmers and aspects such as landscape and water body restoration are often not considered accordingly. As a result, the lack of acceptance by farmers is a major obstacle to maintaining and restoring the ecological quality of the agricultural landscape, including the inland waters it contains. Therefore, this project focuses on a transdisciplinary understanding of farmers` decision making and their acceptance regarding the adoption of management options at the interface of socio-economics, agronomy and ecology. To this end, the existing transnational networks already established in the ERA-NET C-IPM BioAWARE project will be activated and existing data will be experimentally complemented by: i) assessing changes in terms of biodiversity of ground beetles, vegetation and in water bodies across landscape gradients in habitats and ii) socio-economic and agronomic studies within the networks. The focus of this project is on the ecosystem services of ground beetles with respect to weed seed regulation. Indeed, previous research within this consortium has shown that ground beetles consume the seeds of many of the noxious weeds in agricultural fields and thus can contribute to weed regulation. In addition, the transdisciplinary work plans and reuse of data and resources (farmer networks, etc.) generated by the BioAWARE project will help answer the project`s research questions.