Acronym: AgroBioDiv
- How does organic agriculture in general and organic varieties in particular impact and interplay with biodiversity in the agricultural landscape?
- How do politics and public administration perceive biodiversity?
- Which interests do they represent in the political-administrative process?
- What are the effects of the different political instruments that are used to achieve a transformation of agricultural ecosystems in Baden-Württemberg towards sustainability?
AgroBioDiv is an interdisciplinary project that connects expertise from biology and political sciences in order to use the potential of mapping data as a basis for planning-related assessments and monitoring. Furthermore, the mapping data is intended to support the creation of concepts on how to promote biodiversity in larger landscape areas.
The project targets agricultural landscapes in particular, however, it does provide insights that are possibly transferable to other landscapes as well. Agricultural landscapes open a chance for providing habitat for a wide range of plants and insects. However, in the last decades the biological diversity has been declining due to several factors. In addition, the decline has led to a lack of good modelling of these landscapes. Concepts for cities are being developed in order to bring sustainability and climate protection to the center of attention and to re-define the role of humans and their needs and wants. However, cities are not suitable for protecting, promoting, and allotting new spaces for the local biodiversity to the extent necessary.
Organic farming has a positive impact on biodiversity. The number of species of farmland birds, field flora, flower-visiting insects, and cultivated crops are most often considerably higher in organically farmed areas. Thus, these areas have a great potential to achieve the targeted goals of preserving and promoting biodiversity. Currently, 14% of the agricultural land in Baden-Württemberg is farmed according to organic principles.
However, in order to meet the challenges of biodiversity loss, the State of Baden-Würrtemberg, its legislative assembly (Landtag), and citizens' initiatives call for doubling the share of organically farmed land in the state. To pursue this goals, seeds and plant material appropriate for organic farming are of critical importance. That is why this project starts with this long-neglected aspect.
The aim of the project is to contribute to a sustainable development of agro-ecosystems in Baden-Württemberg through observation and sensitization. In view of the biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes, currently present in the public's awareness due to the massive insect die-off and progressing climate change, we perceive agrobiodiversity as a central component of the ecological system in our cultural landscape. We pose the question of how agriculture can set the trend towards an ecologically sustainable future.
Interested stakeholders from agriculture and nature conservation will assess the cultural landscapes' biodiversity in selected regions, namely the "Organic Region of Lake Constance", the city of Heidelberg and the demonstration fields for seed breeding. Within four years of observations, two research branches will be merged: the diversity of species and varieties of cultivated crops with the main focus on grains, as well as the diversity of accompanying wild herbs on agricultural fields. The process of data collection is a primary component of the participatory research project. It builds upon competent contact persons for each link in this chain (seed breeders, propagators, farmers, producers, marketers, consumers) and aims to provide answers on the question of wheater or not public awareness of promoting biological diversity can and should play a critical role in this transformation process towards a sustainable agriculture. The project seeks to meet these objectives by integrating both, natural and political sciences, as well as citizen scientists in an interdisciplinary approach.
