The JAEP ecology of farmland modelling initiative : spatial models for farmland ecology

Intensive agriculture, which has dominated agricultural policy in post-war Britain, has caused major changes to the countryside. These have been characterized by the replacement of variable countryside by large contiguous monocultures of grass, cereal or vegetables. Conversely, natural habitats such as woodland and hedgerows, have become increasingly fragmented and distances separating patches of natural habitat have become greater. These changes have generally been recognized to be detrimental to the natural flora and fauna, but before JAEP, few attempts had been made to explore the problems in depth. The Joint Agriculture and Environment Programme (JAEP) was initiated to carry out scientific investigation of a more rigorous kind on the effects of agricultural activity on farmland ecosystems. In particular, we wanted to find out what kind of farming is sustainable in both a social, economic and ecological sense (JAEP 1994, p. 3).