Estimating the cost of different strategies for measuring farmland biodiversity: Evidence from a Europe-wide field evaluation

•The paper presents farm-scale costs and the efforts required to measure six parameters to monitor biodiversity.•A database composed of Europe-wide field trials was analysed with a consistent cost assessment method to estimate the required costs and effort to complete the measurement of biodiversity on a standardised farm using three different staff-cost scenarios.•The variability of the data indicates that producing a reliable estimation of the costs of monitoring farmland biodiversity requires a large data-set and sample pool of farms, farm types and countries.•Our results point to a possible cost reduction of 46% with farmer involvement and of 77% with volunteer involvement in comparison with monitoring activities subcontracted to private agencies only. Forty percent of the EU land area is currently considered to be agriculturally managed (utilised agricultural area – UAA – Eurostat Agricultural Census 2010), and attention to the environmental performance of farming practices is growing. To determine the performance of agricultural practices, farm-scale monitoring programmes are required but their implementation is hampered by a number of difficulties such as the identification of broadly applicable indicators appropriate for different biogeographic locations, and the evaluation of the effectiveness and costs of different monitoring approaches. In this paper, we focus on the costs of farm-scale biodiversity monitoring, presenting results from a Europe-wide cost data collection in the EU FP7 BioBio Project. Firstly, we present an analytical assessment of resources consumed by the research units and a cost estimation for the measurement of six biodiversity-related parameters: farm habitats, vegetation, wild bees and bumblebees, spiders, earthworms and farm management. Thereafter, we estimate a standardised cost for an ordinary measurement of the six parameters at farm-scale. In doing so, we highlight the cost differences between three strategies involving different potential actors (professional agencies, farmers, volunteers). This analysis demonstrates that producing reliable data on monitoring costs requires a large sample pool of farms and farm types, as was the case in the BioBio project. The cost standardisation allowed us to estimate a cost for biodiversity monitoring ranging between €2700 and €8200 per farm, depending on the chosen strategy.