Typology of Agricultural Land Systems in Germany to Support Tailoring of Agri-Environmental Schemes to Reduce Pressures on Farmland Biodiversity

Farmland biodiversity and associated ecosystem services are threatened by the expansion and intensification of agriculture. Despite substantial efforts, European conservation policies have largely failed to halt or reverse the decline of farmland biodiversity. To address the pressures associated with agricultural intensification more effectively, conservation measures - such as agri-environmental schemes – need to be tailored based on spatially explicit land system classifications that reflect the interdependencies between agricultural land use and biodiversity. In this study, we present a spatially explicit typology of agricultural land systems in Germany offering a meaningful generalization of the country’s agricultural landscapes to inform and support the tailoring of agri-environmental schemes. We applied a cluster analysis based on indicators of land cover, landscape structure, land-use intensity of different production systems, as well as biophysical indicators, such as climate and topography. Experts from agriculture, conservation, and administration sectors contributed to refining both the indicator selection and the clustering results. Clustering revealed eight distinct agricultural land system types in Germany, including arable cash crop-dominated, animal husbandry-dominated, and mosaic land-use agricultural land system types. Each type represents a characteristic combination of indicators, offering key insights into the specific pressures affecting farmland biodiversity. Drawing on this typology, we discuss entry points for tailoring agri-environmental schemes to reduce land system-specific pressures on biodiversity. This typology has the potential to increase the ecological effectiveness of agri-environmental schemes by tailoring them to land system-specific pressures. Moreover, the methodological approach can be adapted to other countries or scaled beyond the national level.