Biodiversity and agricultural landscapes

This chapter reviews current bottom-up and top-down approaches to achieving this ambitious goal. As it points out, agricultural regions where wild nature is now closer to 1% than 30% by area are unlikely to retain some or perhaps most native species using bottom-up biodiversity-friendly farm management approaches, valuable as these are. The solution in such regions is the restoration of large areas of farmland, perhaps whole farms and clusters of farms, to habitats managed for native biodiversity. This chapter highlights how this might be achieved through a case study based on the Mount Lofty region of South Australia. It also discusses ongoing challenges in meeting this goal by assessing the impact of over-extraction of water on the ecological health of the Murray–Darling Basin in south-eastern Australia and the effectiveness of attempts to address this problem.