FARMER CLUSTERS FOR REALISING AGROBIODIVERSITY MANAGEMENT ACROSS EUROPE

FRAMEwork is constructed around the “Farmer Cluster” approach that is bottom-up, farmer- led and has been successfully implemented in the UK on over quarter of a million hectares. FRAMEWORK will enrich and innovate existing Farmer Clusters by liaising with local and (inter)national stakeholder groups, and set up new, multi-actor, Farmer Clusters in different cropping systems in Europe, based on existing collaborations. The Farmer Clusters will be united in a European-wide self-sustaining network, the Citizen Observatory and Information Hub that will facilitate farmer and citizen-based collection and sharing of harmonised, high-quality information on biodiversity and farming, and develop engaging online and offline activities to amplify awareness and understanding of biodiversity and BSF across different stakeholders in Europe. The scientific contribution to these citizen-based activities will deliver the following outcomes: 1) Advanced ecological understanding of the drivers of biodiversity change in agricultural landscapes¸2) a Decision Support Tool (DST) for the selection of biodiversity-sensitive management by farmers based on their local requirement; 3) a DST to support biodiversity targeting, monitoring and evaluation and 4) private and public incentives to foster biodiversity-sensitive farming as a public good. Furthermore, FRAMEwork will assess the effectiveness of the Farmer Cluster approach to develop and implement place and system-specific biodiversity-sensitive farming practices and evaluate the economic and environmental performance, delivering a permanent on-line evaluation tool on the Citizen Observatory and Information Hub. The TRL of the DSTs ranges from 3-5, where improvements are foreseen for the TRL5 DST, while the ones at TRL3 will be brought to TRL4-5 through testing and improvements in the Farmers Clusters. FRAMEwork will be innovative in the way in which it will implement EU ethics, data protection and gender regulations.