In practice, this could mean incentivizing riparian buffer strips, forest patches, hedgerows, or agroforestry." "Our results show that the negative impact of increased farm size can be mitigated by conserving land cover diversity within the agricultural landscape. Noack says agri-environmental policies play an important role in harmonizing agricultural intensification with biodiversity conservation targets. Based on our results we can then provide the information for policies to mitigate the negative impact of agricultural industrialization on biodiversity." "The high resolution land cover data allowed us to characterize the bird habitat for each bird diversity observation including field size, crop type, and land use intensity. The study used a biodiversity database along with citizen science observations, and layered this on top of satellite farm images to make correlations between farm size, crop cover, land cover diversity and land use intensity.Ĭombining geolocalized bird diversity data from systematic bird surveys and opportunistic citizen science data with high resolution satellite images allowed researchers to study the mechanisms that relate farm size to biodiversity. This provides an ideal setup to study the impact of farm size on biodiversity in an otherwise ecological and politically similar environment. Researchers found that increased farm sizes resulted in a 15 per cent decline in bird diversity.Īlthough the former inner German border has lost its political implications after the German reunification, farms are still five times larger on the eastern side of the border compared to the western side as a legacy of the former farm collectivization in East Germany.įarms in East Germany have been privatized for 30 years now, but the sharp differences in farm sizes remains along the former border. To understand this relationship, the researchers studied how different farming indicators impact the diversity of local birds in the farmland bordering the former Iron Curtain in Germany. "Wildlife is a good indicator of a healthy agroecosystem and one thing we wanted to understand was the link between farm size and biodiversity in surrounding areas," says Frederik Noack, Assistant Professor in the Food and Resource Economics Group, part of UBC's Faculty of Land and Food Systems.