Eco-efficiency in the agricultural landscape of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Intensified agricultural production systems relying on larger field sizes and homogeneous landscapes result in land degradation, biodiversity losses, and impaired ecosystem services, particularly regulating services such as water and climate regulation. A multifunctional landscape composition and configuration promises higher ecosystem functionality by balancing ecological and economic provisioning functionality for food, fuel, and fiber. However, to the best of our knowledge, not much is known about the synergies and trade-offs of different landscape compositions and configurations and landscape designs providing ecosystem functionality in economic and ecological dimensions. We addressed the question whether the ecosystem functionality of agricultural landscapes can be improved at given levels of economic valuation. We quantified potential improvements of ecosystem functionality through multifunctional landscape composition and configuration. We identified agricultural landscapes that provide high ecosystem functionality at their level of economic valuation, given that such regions may serve as role models for a target landscape composition. Using an eco-efficiency approach based on the non-parametric order-m estimator, we quantified potential improvements of ecosystem functionality at the agricultural landscapes scale. We used the 20 km2 hexagonal grid level in the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. We described landscape composition and configuration using spatially explicit land cover data from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS); land value data indicated the economic output of the landscape. We investigated robustness of our results under different grid specifications (10–50 km2) and using subsamples of regions with similar environmental conditions. We found on average high eco-efficiency of agricultural landscapes in the study region. We also found notable improvement potentials in at least one ecological indicator that were spatially clustered. The results suggest the potential for Pareto improvements, i.e., increasing landscape eco-efficiency without sacrificing economic outputs. We present a novel empirical approach to evaluate the eco-efficiency of agricultural landscapes and investigate spatial patterns of eco-efficiency at the landscape scale. We modeled landscapes' potential multifunctionality at a fine regional scale using indicators for landscape composition and configuration based on spatially explicit and highly granular land use and land management data. We relied on publicly available data, and our approach can serve to develop monitoring or policy evaluation at the landscape scale.