In Europe and elsewhere, agri‐environmental schemes (AES) are designed to reduce agriculture's impacts on the environment. Designing effective schemes requires an understanding of the reasons that drive farmers' decisions whether to adopt AES. Currently, most insights come from individual case studies or structured surveys based on predefined questions. There is a paucity of studies that do not rely on rigid preconceptions about relevant behavioural factors while also offering a geographically and socio‐culturally broad perspective that can address the cultural and institutional context‐specificity of behavioural studies. Also, most studies focus on the adoption decision, while implementation decisions and their consequences for the ecological effectiveness of AES remain understudied. In this article, we present the results from semi‐structured farmer interviews conducted in five agricultural landscapes across Europe. The results are used to uncover reasons for AES adoption as well as the implications of AES implementation decisions for their ecological effectiveness. The main reason for AES adoption that was common across case study regions is the interplay of opportunity costs and payment levels, which has negative implications for the ecological effectiveness of AES as farmers prioritized marginal land or adopted non‐additional AES. Among reasons that vary across regions, tenure relations and the role of ecological reasoning stand out. We find that AES are unlikely to trigger broader shifts towards sustainable management but there is some potential for improvement, mainly by increasing the flexibility, spatial targeting and ecological ambition of the schemes. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

The issue of defining functional regions in the Czech Republic is presented in this paper, which contributes to both theoretical discussions (e.g. the modifiable areal unit problem) and practical applications (e.g. spatial administration, regional planning). A multistage agglomerative approach to functional regional taxonomy is applied, which has been used in Czech geographical research for the first time only recently. The regionalisation algorithm provided four optional solutions for this issue, based on the analysis of daily travel-to-work flows from the 2001 census. The resulting regions correspond to the micro-regional level and two additional tiers were identified at this level. The basic statistics for all variants are presented.

The adoption of agri-environment practices (AEPs) is crucial for safeguarding the long-term sustainability of ecosystem services within European agricultural landscapes. However, the tailoring of agri-environment policies to the unique characteristics of farming systems is a challenging task, often neglecting local farm parameters or requiring extensive farm survey data. Here, we develop a simplified typology of farming system archetypes (FSAs), using field-level data on farms’ economic size and specialisation derived from the Integrated Administration and Control System in three case studies in Germany, Czechia and the United Kingdom. Our typology identifies groups of farms that are assumed to react similarly to agricultural policy measures, bridging the gap between efforts to understand individual farm behaviour and broad agri-environmental typologies. We assess the usefulness of our approach by quantifying the spatial association of identified archetypes of farming systems with ecologically relevant AEPs (cover crops, fallow, organic farming, grassland maintenance, vegetation buffers, conversion of cropland to grassland and forest) to understand the rates of AEP adoption by different types of farms. Our results show that of the 20 archetypes, economically large farms specialised in general cropping dominate the agricultural land in all case studies, covering 56% to 85% of the total agricultural area. Despite regional differences, we found consistent trends in AEP adoption across diverse contexts. Economically large farms and those specialising in grazing livestock were more likely to adopt AEPs, with economically larger farms demonstrating a proclivity for a wider range of measures. In contrast, economically smaller farms usually focused on a narrower spectrum of AEPs and, together with farms with an economic value <2 000 EUR, accounted for 70% of all farms with no AEP uptake. These insights indicate the potential of the FSA typology as a framework to infer key patterns of AEP adoption, thus providing relevant information to policy-makers for more direct identification of policy target groups and ultimately for developing more tailored agri-environment policies.

Soil is negatively affected by many degradation factors, of which soil erosion is the most serious, affecting soil quality, crop production, and environmental components. Soil quality is an issue dealt with in the New European Green Deal. In order to meet the set goals, it will be necessary to address soil degradation and water erosion in the agricultural landscape, and increase the area of green infrastructure within the landscape (e.g., fragments of woodland, windbreaks, and grassland). In this context, climate change is also expected to affect the frequency and intensity of torrential rainfall, leading to increased runoff, reduced infiltration, and greater soil loss. Therefore, in this study, we have elaborated the issue of agricultural landscape and erosion, looking at erosion control measures necessary in dealing with existing erosion processes in an intensively farmed area with chernozem soils, and compared these with scenarios assumed for 2050. In these future scenarios, the commonly applied agrotechnical measures will not suffice to keep soil loss at a tolerable level. In the future, it will be necessary to discuss a further reduction in the size of land blocks, with the inclusion of green infrastructure in the landscape. In addition to solving problems of erosion, this would increase diversity in the area and enable sustainable agricultural management.