Wendy Fjellstad

Many countries have goals to reduce soil sealing of agricultural land to preserve food production capacity. To monitor progress, reliable data are needed to quantify soil sealing and changes over time. We examined the potential of the Imperviousness Classified Change (IMCC) 2015–2018 product provided by the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) to assess soil sealing in agricultural areas in Poland and Norway. We found very high overall accuracy due to the dominance of the area with no change. When we focused on areas classified as change, we found low user accuracy, with over-estimation of soil sealing. The producer accuracy was generally much higher, meaning that real cases of soil sealing were captured. This is better than under-estimation of soil sealing because it highlights areas where sealing may have occurred, allowing the user to carry out further control of this much smaller area, without having to assess the great expanse of unchanged area. We concluded that the datasets provide useful information for Europe. They are standardized and comparable across countries, which can enable comparison of the effects of policies intended to prevent soil sealing. Some distinctions between classes are not reliable, but the general information about increase or decrease is useful.

Urban agriculture is a nature-based solution to increase the economic, social and environmental sustainability of cities and city food systems. However, sustainability is difficult to measure, and there is therefore discussion about whether urban agriculture really contributes positively to sustainability. Monitoring data could provide evidence of the impacts of urban agriculture and help inform decision makers about whether and where to prioritise different forms of urban agriculture above competing interests.Using case examples from five European cities, we identified the challenges involved in monitoring urban agriculture, from selecting indicators and gathering data, to using the results. We found large differences in approach in terms of what topics to monitor and who was responsible, who gathered the data and when, what data was recorded and how they were stored, and how findings were disseminated or published. Based on these experiences, we recommend stronger involvement of existing interest groups and educational institutions in monitoring urban agriculture, and promotion of convenient tools for data collection by citizen science and for long-term data storage.

The OECD uses a wide range of agri-environmental indicators to monitor effects of the agricultural sector on the environment. However, the only indicator of farmland biodiversity is the farmland bird index, and this is not reported by all member states. Therefore, work is ongoing to design a more general indicator of farmland biodiversity that can be reported by all member states.There are many challenges in creating an indicator that can be applied across all OECD countries. These countries have very diverse farming systems, land ownership, climate, biophysical conditions, and species pools. In addition, there are big differences in the type and amount of data available with which to calculate an indicator. Some countries already have monitoring programmes, tailored to their specific national needs and priorities. It may be challenging to harmonize reporting across countries, when data are collected in different ways and from different sources.As a first step, the OECD published in 2023 guidelines for the development of an OECD farmland habitat biodiversity indicator (https://doi.org/10.1787/09d45d55-en). The aim is to calculate an indicator based on all agricultural habitats within a country, both those of high nature value, but also the ordinary and those that are currently of very low value.In 2024, several countries are testing calculation of the indicator using national data. This presentation will describe the proposed indicator and share experiences from work to calculate the indicator for Norway.

Many countries have goals and strategies to reduce soil sealing of agricultural land to preserve food production capacity. This is essential in relation to Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger. To monitor progress, reliable data are needed to quantify soil sealing and changes over time. We examined the potential of the Copernicus High Resolution Layer Imperviousness Density (HRL IMD) to assess soil sealing in agricultural areas in Poland and Norway.We quantified the accuracy and reliability of the products Imperviousness Classified Change (IMCC) for the period 2015-2018 and Imperviousness degree (IMD) for the reference year 2018. We found a very high overall accuracy of IMCC 2015-2018 in both Poland and Norway. However, this was mainly due to the dominance of area with no change. When we focused on the small areas where change does occur, we found low user accuracy, with an overestimation of soil sealing. The producer accuracy was generally much higher, meaning that real cases of soil sealing were captured. This is a much better result than if IMCC had under-estimated soil sealing. It suggests that IMCC can play a valuable role in detecting soil sealing, by highlighting areas where soil sealing may have occurred, allowing the user to carry out a further control of this much smaller area, without having to assess the great expanse of unchanged area.We conclude that the datasets provide useful information for Europe. They are standardised and comparable across countries, which can enable comparison of the effects of policies intended to prevent soil sealing of agricultural land. We advise caution in using older versions of the change data. In particular, it is advisable to merge the closely related classes “1: new cover” and “11: increased cover” and the same for “2: loss of cover” and “12: decreased cover”. These distinctions are not reliable, but the general information about increase or decrease is much better. The transition to finer resolution (10 x 10 m) in the newer datasets represents a great improvement and will make the change data more reliable and useful in future versions.

Over the past few decades, there has been increasing interest in recording landscape change. Monitoring programmes have been established to measure the scope, direction and rate of change, and assess the consequences of changes for multiple interests, such as biodiversity, cultural heritage and recreation. The results can provide feedback for multiple sectors and policy domains. Political interests may change over time, but long-term monitoring demands long-term funding. This requires that monitoring programmes remain relevant and cost-efficient. In this paper, we document experiences from 20 years of the Norwegian Monitoring Programme for Agricultural Landscapes—the ‘3Q Programme’. We explain how data availability and demands for information have changed over time, and how the monitoring programme has been adapted to remain relevant. We also discuss how methods of presentation influence the degree of knowledge transfer to stakeholders, in particular to policy makers.

Norway has a political goal to minimize the loss of cultural heritage due to removal, destruction or decay. On behalf of the national Directorate for Cultural Heritage, we have developed methods to monitor Cultural Heritage Environments. The complementary set of methods includes (1) landscape mapping through interpretation of aerial photographs, including field control of the map data, (2) qualitative and quantitative initial and repeat landscape photography, (3) field recording of cultural heritage objects including preparatory analysis of public statistical data, and (4) recording of stakeholder attitudes, perceptions and opinions. We applied these methods for the first time to the historical clustered farm settlement of Havrå in Hordaland County, West Norway. The methods are documented in a handbook and can be applied as a toolbox, where different monitoring methods or frequency of repeat recording may be selected, dependent on local situations, e.g., on the landscape character of the area in focus.