Connecting habitats in European agricultural landscapes: Farmers’ spatial preferences for linear wildlife corridors

Abstract

Habitat fragmentation in agricultural landscapes threatens biodiversity. Enhancing landscape connectivity across cultivated areas requires a thorough understanding of farmers’ spatial considerations and their willingness to create semi-natural habitats. We therefore conducted a spatial choice experiment with farmers from ten European countries to assess their preferences for placing linear wildlife habitats (hedgerows and wildflower strips) at the field scale under different scenarios, as well as the role of farm and personal factors. A total of 471 responses were analysed using multinomial logistic regression and generalised linear mixed models. The results indicate that landscape conditions, including field shape, slope, soil quality, and pre-existing landscape features, exert a significant influence on farmers’ decisions, as do the size of machinery, cultural regions, attitudes towards biodiversity, and type of intervention. On the other hand, no statistical significance was found for other variables. In general, farmers’ choices were driven by a desire to minimise disturbance to field work, optimise productivity, increase biodiversity, and address specific environmental challenges. The insights into farmers’ decision-making from this study can inform ecological network planning to reduce transaction costs by pre-selecting likely adopters, and to mitigate resistance and lower financial compensation by identifying best-fit options aligned with farmers’ practices. Integrating these findings into geospatial models could improve predictions of the impact of spatially targeted biodiversity conservation strategies on landscape composition and future biodiversity trends in agricultural areas.