Landscape indicators and agri-environmental policies for biodiversity enhancement on agricultural lands

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We propose to develop and test policies and associated practices that farmers can use to enhance biodiversity while maintaining agricultural output. A variety of such policies and practices have been suggested but they have not been evaluated on the ground, and compared in terms of their effectiveness in sustaining biodiversity. Hence our overall research question: Are there effective ways to indirectly measure the biodiversity of farmland (i.e., biodiversity indicators) and, if so, can we use these indicators to identify effective practices that farmers can use to enhance biodiversity on their farmlands? We hypothesize a strong link between biodiversity and landscape heterogeneity, i.e., the variety of landcover/landuse types and the complexity of their spatial distribution. We propose to measure biodiversity (birds, amphibians, bees, and butterflies) at a large number of agricultural sites throughout Eastern Ontario. We will use remotely-sensed data supplemented with farming