PhD in Biodiversity Management - Title of PhD project: Sustainability performance of ecological approaches to farming at regional scale

Implementing novel, environmentally friendly farming approaches could help ensure agriculture can supply adequate food to a growing population while minimising negative environmental, economic and social impacts.
Assessing the effectiveness of these approaches is dependent on a comprehensive evaluation of their performance and sustainability. Moreover, successful interventions to encourage the spread of ecological farming practices must be informed by an understanding of the drivers of adoption for these new approaches.This proposal aims to address these issues by assessing the sustainability of ecological farming approaches at a regional scale for two contrasting agricultural landscapes in lowland Britain - the High Weald AONB and the Berkshire Downs. A combination of questionnaire surveys and qualitative interviews will be used to gain in-depth insight into drivers influencing adoption of ecological farming approaches. These insights will be used to inform the development of different ecological farming expansion scenarios, and spatial analysis techniques will be used to generate hypothetical landscape maps for each scenario. Analysis of existing literature on environmental, social and economic impacts of ecological farming approaches will be used to understand how the different spatial patterns of farming practices under each scenario affect provision of public goods and ecosystem services. These findings will then be combined in an integrated sustainability assessment, where ecological farming approaches will be assessed against regional sustainability targets. This assessment will be underpinned by network analysis, to investigate the interactions among the cause-effect relationships linking drivers to impacts for each approach.