Farmers' contribution to landscape services in the Netherlands under different rural development scenarios

Landscape services represent the benefits human populations derive, directly or indirectly, from (agro-)ecosystem functions at the landscape scale. Many of these services are the result of farmers' decision making to allocate resources to other activities than food production and therefore are the result of farm the adoption of on-farm rural activities. With changing agricultural and rural policies, the future provision of landscape services to fulfill societal demands is not guaranteed. This study aims at mapping the spatial distribution of the adoption of on-farm rural activities under different explorative scenarios. For a Dutch landscape, storylines at the landscape scale were developed by combining global storylines, resulting from the Global Environmental Outlook, with local storylines resulting from key informant interviews. Subsequently these storylines were translated into quantitative scenarios that were implemented into a simulation procedure based on spatially explicit econometric models of farmer's decision making. Results show that further market liberalization leads to a decrease of landscape services in the study area. In our study, only increased cooperation between government, farmers and citizens appears to result in a general increase of all landscape services across the entire landscape.

► Contribution of farmers to spatially distributed landscape functions is assessed.
► Future of landscape functions is explored using multiple global policy scenarios.
► Policies involving farmers are likely to increase the provision of rural services.