Arguments and options for quantifying and monitoring differentiated land use

The concept of differentiated land use was formulated already 50 years ago to preserve biodiversity and to maintain or re-store the necessary landscape structure. Although it has been anchored in the Federal Nature Conservation Act, there is still no monitoring of its implementation, although the German Ad-visory Council on the Environment has been calling for this for 25 years. The paper argues that the technical prerequisites for monitoring the differentiated land use are ready today and discusses the conceptual steps necessary. It identifies several dimensions and proposes corresponding indicators of land-scape structure, in particular the degree of diversification and the mixing of intensive land uses, the distribution of the size of intensively used areas, the proportion of semi-natural areas (at least 10%) and the interconnected arrangement of semi -natural areas. Furthermore, the paper discusses suitable ref-erence units and existing data. Finally, we identify remaining gaps in the data basis and discuss the question of defining target values.

VIVO