EU Crop Diversity

Crop diversity has been related to in the stability of food production at the large scales such as the national level, and to pesticide use, agroecosystem resilience and natural biodiversity in agroecosystems at smaller scales such as the farm level. However, crop diversity is difficult to estimate at small scales because of the lack of data with sufficient spatial resolution. Here, we use a new product derived from satellite remote sensing at 10 meters spatial resolution to compute crop diversity at different spatial scales, from the farm to regional and country level in Europe. We show that spatial diversity increases with the size of the spatial aggregations, as generally expected. We focus on selected spatial scale to derive useful indicators that can be related to farm resilience (α-diversity), to the general production stability of larger spatial aggregations such as administrative and political boundaries (γ-diversity), and to the relationships between the two (boundaries (β-diversity).

D'ANDRIMONT Raphael;  ZAMPIERI Matteo;  CLAVERIE Martin;  DENTENER Franciscus;  VAN DER VELDE Marijn; 

2022-06-07

European Commission

JRC129557