Landscape features on farms: Evidence on factors influencing their quantity and ecological value

Antonia Kaiser, Yanbing Wang, Noëlle Klein, Gabriele Mack and Christian Ritzel

Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 235, issue C

Abstract: Intensive agriculture and increasingly homogeneous agricultural landscapes are major drivers of biodiversity loss. The implementation of landscape features (e.g. hedges, trees, and field margins) as part of ecological focus areas on farms is a promising approach. This study aims to fill the gaps in understanding the influence of factors related to farmers' willingness and ability on their implementation of landscape features. We combine survey data on socio-psychological, economic, and sociodemographic factors collected in 2023 from 882 Swiss farmers with agricultural census data on registered landscape features and with biodiversity scores. Using regression analysis and various robustness checks, we estimate the influence of the above-mentioned factors on the farm area covered by landscape features and the ecological value of these features. Our findings indicate that both farmers' willingness (personal norms and self-efficacy to conserve biodiversity) and ability (biodiversity payments, education, and farm type) to preserve biodiversity affect the area of landscape features. The ecological value provided by landscape features is more influenced by farmers' ability than by their willingness. However, we also find that for landscape features that are not supported by biodiversity payments, farmers' willingness (i.e. personal norms) plays a decisive role, while ability is not important.

Keywords: Biodiversity conservation; Agriculture; Farmer decision-making; Landscape elements; Structural elements; Implementation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800925001296
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:235:y:2025:i:c:s0921800925001296

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108646

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().