Grassland conservation across European landscapes protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services with ecological networks

"Permanent grasslands are an important land cover type in European protected area networks, valued for their biodiversity and ecosystem services (ES). Aligning the biodiversity and ES conservation agendas whilst sustaining agricultural land-use on a landscape scale is an important societal priority. Integrating social-ecological knowledge on grassland use in protected areas would provide an important basis for developing and maintaining protected landscapes and for optimizing the use of scarce public resources.GreeNet’s major objective, therefore, is to develop transition pathways for sustainable management of European grasslands under a combined land sparing and land sharing paradigm prototyping novel ways to develop and maintain protected landscapes. GreeNet will analyse grassland case studies in Austria, Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and Switzerland considering a gradient of protection status from currently unprotected but highly valuable landscapes, to Natura 2000 areas, biosphere reserves, nature parks, and national parks.GreeNet brings together scholars from multiple disciplines and stakeholders across multiple scales. Its inter- and transdisciplinary methodology integrates assessments of conservation management options at the farm level with field and landscape scale assessments of innovative indicators of biodiversity and ES considering spatial effects from landscape coordination. Methodologies are jointly developed at consortium level and applied at case study level. They include i) the design of integrated conservation management options at the landscape scale through the mapping of grasslands with machine-learning techniques, ii) the evaluation of landscape multifunctionality with ecological tools across landscape intensity gradients, iii) the empirical assessment and modelling of attitudes, preferences, and constraints of farmers regarding individual and collaborative conservation management options and landscape protection statuses, taking into account global change scenarios, iv) the analysis of cost-effectiveness of conservation incentive schemes in different governance systems using a policy planning model at landscape scale and v) the analysis and development of governance strategies towards long-term protection of grassland landscapes. Participatory processes are organised at three levels (farms, regions, international), during different project stages, with different levels of engagement, and in multiple participatory processes. The social-ecological perspective in GreeNet on the spatially explicit field and landscape scale allows to identify the barriers and enabling factors that make landscape protection effective and acceptable by farmers and the public. Hence, GreeNet will address local landscape scale design challenges and Pan-European policy goals such as the national biodiversity strategies, the Aichi-targets, and SDGs."