A mapping method of crop composition and configuration to study their effect on biodiversity of European agricultural landscapes
Résumé
Agricultural landscapes approximately occupy 40% of available land surface. As such they constitute a eystone in biodiversity conservation programs. In return, biodiversity contributes to production through ecosystem services as pollination or pest control. In this perspective, deciphering the role of agricultural landscape heterogeneity in maintaining biodiversity may be a promising research direction. In most agricultural regions, the trend is to increase field size dedicated to a decreasing cover type number. What are the effects on biodiversity of such a changeover in rural landscapes spatial patterns? May new policies involving a modification of this trend be envisaged? The FARMLAND project precisely aims at giving an answer to these questions combining tools from geomatics, remote sensing and geostatistics associated to ecological research on biodiversity. Based on spatial indexes from landscape metrics, this work proposes a mapping method for sampling quadrats and constituting an experiment design in order to dissociate the influence of composition (the number and probability of occurrence of the different cover types) and configuration landscape heterogeneity (the spatial display of cover types) on biodiversity. After the sampling of 40 quadrats in each of the 7 European sites, multi-taxa biodiversity records and ecosystem services identification will be undertaken. We present here the different steps of the adaptation of the initial methodology from [1, 2] to the French site “Vallées et Coteaux de Gascogne” that constituted a test zone for the other European sites. We discuss the discrepancies and modifications from the Canadian princeps study.