Modelling semi-natural habitat area on lowland farms in western Ireland

A significant policy objective is the need for protection of biodiversity not just within designated Natura 2000 sites, but also in areas that occur outside of these sites. However there is a lack of information on existing semi-natural habitat cover on EU farms, making it difficult to assess whether targets for halting the loss of agricultural biodiversity are being met. To achieve these targets, reliable yet easy-to-use methods are needed for accurately identifying priority areas for conservation actions and monitoring biodiversity on a large spatial scale.Remote sensing, farmland statistics and species data have been used in some EU countries to create maps to estimate the extent of semi-natural habitat cover but these are acknowledged as being too broad scale. In this study, we examined a method of fine-scale prediction of the spatial coverage of semi-natural habitats in lowland farms. A generalized additive model (GAM) was used to investigate the relationships between landscape and farm management variables and the lowland farmland habitat biodiversity on 32 farms outside of conservation designations, in a region of western Ireland. Semi-natural habitat cover on lowland farms could be predicted with a model using stocking density, soil diversity and river and stream length. It is proposed that this model could be used to predict the coverage of semi-natural habitats on farms in other regions of Ireland with similar land-use and landscape. A similar modelling approach could be adapted for application in other regions of Ireland and across Europe with different landscapes to predict semi-natural habitat coverage.