Files
Abstract
Landscape change today is occurring more rapidly than in any other
time in history. Among other influences such as global warming these changes
are also driven by political decisions affecting ecosystem services. The overall
research objective is to defi ne how the European Union’s political strategies implemented
through rural development programmes and the Common Agricultural
Policy (CAP) are infl uencing or changing ecosystem goods and services
in the future. This contribution aims at outlining the research framework and
especially focuses on a ground rent approach to model the spatially explicit distribution
of subsidy cash fl ows on farm and parcel level. Experiments with changing
political strategies and incentive payments were carried out in the Mondsee
catchment (Austria) using GIS and remote sensing for facilitation. The results
were visualised and show the dominant (inter-)national and regional funding
programmes of this area. They further display the likely effects of changing political
strategies on the monetary value of certain parcels and the overall farmparcel
balance. The validation of an aggregated set of funding measures reveals
15% deviation between the model framework and real subsidy payments. Thus,
this model is suitable for estimating the impact of changed funding strategies at
EU level and also supports farmers in indentifying the best economic income
sources on parcel and farm level. Embedded in the overall research objective, the
results constitute the basis for opening a discussion on how ecosystem services
might change with political intervention strategies in rural areas and resulting
landscape changes in the future.