Sönke Eggers

The need to balance humanity’s increasing demand for food and biofuels with sustainable development has never been greater. These growing demands are not only pressing against the limits of forestry and agricultural production but contribute to the deterioration of several environmental qualities fundamental to human well-being, including soil and water quality, crop diversity and ecosystem services provided by plants, birds and insects. Alongside global warming, these ecosystem changes pose a serious threat to food security, and the socio-economic viability of European agriculture and forestry production. Therefore my research heads to better understand both local and regional patterns of biodiversity change (i.e. from individual behaviour to population ecology) in these systems and the drivers responsible for them. This knowledge provides important guidance for effective policy making that can achieve positive changes in reversing biodiversity loss when appropriate. However, involving stakeholders in the process is the only way real progress can be achieved. For instance, agri-environmental policies, such as organic farming, are often seen as a trade-off against development to fight the global food crisis. Instead, a common strategy proposed to balance biodiversity and agriculture is to maximise yields at the farm scale, while separate reserves on non-crop land target biodiversity at the broader landscape scale. However, most species that persist in present post-intensified landscapes rely on managed land and it is questionable if crop production and farmland biodiversity can be reconciled by spatially separating arable fields from wildlife areas.