Developing technologies for Agri-environment monitoring

Overview of the project

Approximately £400 million is invested annually in agri environment schemes in England, designed to compensate farmers for loss of production (income foregone) and additional costs, to meet environmental objectives. A further £1.8 billion in subsidies is paid to comply with environmental conditions of cross compliance and greening. In December 2019, it was estimated there were ca. 50,000 agri-environment agreements covering 1.8 million hectares.

Current and previous monitoring of agri-environment schemes is diverse and varied, and conducted at scales of specific management options, whole AES agreements and 1 km squares covering multiple agreements. The Monitoring and Evaluation Programme of these schemes aims to deliver evidence to achieve the following:
• Evaluate the delivery of agri-environment schemes and their effectiveness in achieving their intended policy objectives;
• Inform current and future agri-environment policy, scheme delivery and development;
• Fulfil domestic and European reporting requirements.

The existing Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (2015-2020) for Agri-environment schemes (AES) in England includes four elements: integrated monitoring, landscape scale, thematic, and evaluation and synthesis.

To date, monitoring has been primarily based on tried-and-tested approaches, which provide widely recognised metrics of quality, condition and species-resolution biodiversity data, and that have counterfactuals often derived from national monitoring schemes to enable evaluation of AES. Developing technologies will need to integrate with existing tried-and-tested approaches but offer huge potential for more extensive and efficient evaluation of AES. In this project we focus on technologies with greatest potential to deliver enhanced and more cost-effective monitoring of environmental ‘outcomes’ of direct land management and interventions, in support of the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS). The technology areas covered by this project are: bioacoustics, DNA-methods, Earth Observation, computer vision and machine learning.

For each technology area, the objectives were to:
• Carry out horizon scanning of developing technologies which may be relevant for agrienvironment monitoring;
• Review how these developing technologies could be used for Agri-environment
monitoring;
• Review what outputs/outcomes are relevant for the developing technology;
• Propose how developing technologies could be used in existing and future agrienvironment monitoring;
• Pilot or proof of concept studies to demonstrate how technology could be used for agrienvironment monitoring.