One of the key reasons behind global biodiversity loss is change in land use, which includes agricultural practices that cause extensive damage to the environment. Even though we don’t want to admit this to ourselves, Estonia’s landscapes, soil and water environment and biodiversity have been seriously affected by agricultural techniques that prioritise high yields.

Valuable yet vulnerable islands of biodiversity in the agricultural landscape.

Even regular agricultural landscapes can differ greatly from each other. In some regions, the landscape is characterised by its hilly terrain, while in other areas, overgrown orchards and meadow-like groves can be found in the middle of farmlands. The list of important landscape elements also includes rock piles standing in the middle of fields and the trenches running between the fields. All of these details hold the keys to sustaining biodiversity in today’s intensively managed agricultural areas.

These landscape elements can provide habitats for many plant and insect species. Field margins can also act as connection elements that create a network out of the small areas of natural and semi-natural habitats. Small mammals, birds and insects (including pollinators) can use this network to move around safely.

These landscape elements can provide habitats for many plant and insect species. Field margins can also act as connection elements that create a network out of the small areas of natural and semi-natural habitats. Small mammals, birds and insects (including pollinators) can use this network to move around safely.

Field margins and other natural areas providing habitats for wildlife can only serve their purpose if the necessary conditions have been met. For instance, field margins must be wide enough to buffer the effects of pesticides and fertilisers used in the fields. The appropriate width of a field margin with perennial plants is not less than 3-4 metres. This allows plant species that are more sensitive to their growing conditions to grow there. Wider field margins also increase the abundance and diversity of bumblebees. The development of field margins that are as rich in species as meadows may take a long time. The study conducted by Swedish researchers revealed that in order to reach similar species richness and composition as meadows, a field margin may need to develop for more than 50 years. Therefore, we need to value and preserve existing field margins that have rich and varied vegetation.

Normally, field margins are narrow and other areas providing habitat are small in area. Due to the small size of these natural habitats, pesticides and fertilisers used on the fields often end up in these areas even if they have not been intentionally sprayed there.

What is the state of Estonia’s agricultural landscapes?

Since Estonia has preserved more of its heritage meadows than other European countries and organic fields make up 20% of our agricultural land, our belief that we manage our agricultural landscapes better than Western and Central European countries persists. However, research shows that our agricultural landscapes are not much better than the landscapes in Germany, France, Holland, Poland and Spain when it comes to land quality and the intensity of land use.

The diversity of weed flora in Estonia has suffered and the population of 22 bird species unique to our agricultural landscapes has declined. The effects of intensive land use and landscape simplification are reflected in changes in biodiversity that are invisible to the naked eye. Compared to organic agricultural soils, less fungi species are found in intensively managed agricultural soils. This includes glomeromycetes, fungi that form mycorrhiza.

“Next generation” agricultural landscapes.

Every step we take in agricultural land use now affects the biodiversity of our agricultural landscapes in the future. The food industry continues to use production techniques that are out of date and damage nature, even though the current information technology revolution offers many exciting new methods that help to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture and grow cleaner food. These methods should be tested out more often.

Nature also offers various options for combining nature conservation with clean agricultural produce without significant yield loss. Natural pest control, supporting natural pollinators and other similar methods are seen as one of the main lifelines in agricultural ecology that help to minimise environmental problems, preserve and foster diverse landscapes and produce pesticide-free food.
 

See the full article in the March 2021 issue of Eesti Loodus (Estonian Nature), pp. 28-31 

Author: Tsipe Aavik, Associate Professor of Macroecology at the University of Tartu

Editor: Kaisa Viira

Last modified:  21.04.2022