Environment Systems is part of a Fera (Food & Environment Research Agency) led consortium that has been accepted on to Natural England’s (NE) Environmental Stewardship Monitoring and Evaluation framework and has already gone on to win two bids under that framework. The winning bids come under lot one for agreement scale monitoring of the higher level agri-environment schemes.

Environmental Stewardship provides funding to farmers and other land managers in England to help them deliver effective environmental management on their land. The agreements cover conservation of wildlife, maintenance and enhancement of the landscape, protection of the historic environment and the promotion of public access to and understanding of the countryside. The agreements also seek to protect natural resources, minimise flood risk and enhance the contribution of agriculture and land management to climate change mitigation.

It is generally thought that providing good quality advice and support is essential to achieving satisfactory outcomes from agri-environment scheme agreements but the evidence to support this opinion is largely anecdotal. The first project will investigate over 100 Higher Level Stewardship (HLS) agri-environment agreements which started on farms across England before June 2009, covering a range of habitats. The project will aim to provide substantive evidence of the impact of advice and support on the achievement of the HLS outcomes. The second project will look at agreements that have been in place since February 2013 with the intention to provide evidence in support of NE’s own QA exercise to evaluate the operation of current schemes under new MESME (Making Environmental Stewardship More Effective) guidelines.

The scope of the consortium’s work calls on members’ strengths and breaks down into four distinct areas, in depth telephone and face to face interviews with farmers and third parties, field assessments, evaluation plus database design and support. The field work programme for both projects is being carried out by Fera and ADAS and will run in tandem to assess whether the old schemes have delivered an improvement and look at the scope and effectiveness of recent agreements. CCRI will gather data collected through interviews with farmers, land owners and the consultants providing them with advice.  Environment Systems will design and support the database that holds data for the entire project including every agreement evaluated, plus numeric and text data from field surveys and interviews. They will also deal with the remote sensing evaluation of the more recent schemes.

“Funding landowners and farmers to manage the land in a way which ensures environmental benefit is important,” said Dr Johanna Breyer, Senior Consultant, Environment Systems. “However monitoring is necessary to validate the advice given and measures taken to protect and enhance habitats and to identify what is successful and what is not and how long some habitats take to improve.”