HEAVEN - Habitat Evaluation and Assessment of Valuable Ecosystem services in Non-crop areas
Preserving natural habitats is a key component of biodiversity conservation policies outlined in many international frameworks (e.g., Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity targets, EU’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2023). As efforts to preserve natural habitats intensify, marked by ambitious conservation targets, the significance of integrating non-crop habitats to support resilience and productivity in agricultural landscapes is becoming increasingly apparent. HEAVEN would address crucial gaps in our understanding of agricultural ecosystems and help inform conservation and management strategies by unravelling the intricate dynamics between non-crop habitats, carabid communities and their nutritional ecology, and ecosystem functioning. At the societal level, HEAVEN could help to improve the application of agrienvironment-climate measures and to answer relevant questions for agricultural policy: Which non-crop habitats are needed for supporting carabid communities and associated ecosystem services? Is their use more effective in simple or complex landscapes?
The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).