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

Fourty percent of the EU land area is currently considered to be agriculturally managed, and there is growing attention to the environmental performance of farming practices. This involves the need for farm-scale monitoring programmes for sustainability, but their implementation is hampered by a number of difficulties such as the identification of indicators for different latitudes and environments 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 propose an analytical assessment of resources consumed by the research units and a cost estimation for the measurement of six biodiversity-related parameters: habitat mapping, vegetation, wild bees and bumblebees, spiders, earthworms and a farm management questionnaire. 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 shows that producing reliable data on monitoring costs requires a large sample pool of farms and farming systems as was the case in the BioBio project. The cost standardisation allows us to estimate the cost range between the different strategies ranging between €2700 and €8200 per farm