Around 70% of UK land is farmed, and that land must now produce food, support wildlife, store carbon, and clean water all at once — but no one has a reliable way to design landscapes that do all these jobs well. Current farming policy treats land as a single-purpose asset, mainly for food production. The 25 Year Environment Plan and the Industrial Strategy both call for landscapes that deliver multiple benefits, but policymakers lack the evidence and tools to make that happen. AgLand will fill that gap by developing new metrics — using satellite data and existing national datasets — to measure what a landscape actually does, not just what it looks like. It will then build and validate models that link those landscape measures to real ecological processes like pollination, water quality, and carbon storage. If the research succeeds, government agencies and land managers will gain practical tools to design multi-functional landscapes at scale. That could mean a farmed region that produces food, supports pollinator populations, and reduces flood risk simultaneously — without guesswork. The project also creates a network of study landscapes and a cross-sectoral consensus on knowledge gaps, laying the groundwork for future large-scale land-use decisions.
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The UK's land assets, and the goods and services they provide, are a finite and precious resource that is fundamental to our prosperity, and are intrinsically linked to our cultural heritage, and well-being. Over the next 50 years we expect to see unprecedented competition for land-use driven by a number of factors, including continuing growth in population and incomes, the impact of climate change and environmental degradation, new technologies (e.g. GM), and changing public attitudes and values. Around 70% (17.2 million hectares) of the UK land area is farmed, with 11.7 million ha of highly productive arable and improved grassland. UK agriculture is highly mechanised and efficient, contributing around £8.5 billion (0.6%) Gross Value Added to the UK economy annually and employing around 475,000 people. It is therefore certain that many future land-use conflicts will revolve around competition and trade-offs between food and biomass production, and other ecosystem goods and services required by society. The recently announced 25 Year Environment Plan (25YEP) outlines the UK Government's commitment to the protection and management of our environmental assets to deliver multiple benefits for society. Specifically, it states that future policy will support farmers to 'deliver benefits ....and achieve outcomes at the landscape and catchment level'. This will include habitat management and creation at the landscape scale to create resilient ecological networks, as recommended by Sir John Lawton in his 2010 review. Similarly, the BEIS Industrial Strategy seeks to 'put the UK at the forefront of the global revolution in farming to deliver benefits to farmers, the environment and consumers whilst driving growth, jobs and exports'. This will require farming systems that are sustainable and support the delivery of other ecosystem benefits. To put these new, cross-departmental policies into practice will require a more holistic landscape-scale decision-making framework than is currently available, underpinned by evidence from a high quality, cross-disciplinary research base. New Science to Enable the Design of Agricultural Landscapes that Deliver Multiple Functions (AgLand) will address this need and provide new knowledge, data and metrics, and a research infrastructure of study landscapes to enable evidence-based landscape planning. It will also aim to build cross-sectoral consensus and identify knowledge gaps to inform the design of future Landscape Decisions SPF initiatives. AgLand will build upon the research infrastructure, including new metrics and models, validated using existing NERC and BBSRC strategic investments (i.e. ASSIST, S2N and Wessex BESS), and will deliver this aim through the following objectives: 1) Develop and validate new metrics to describe the composition, structure and function of agricultural landscapes using earth observation techniques and existing national datasets; 2) Construct models describing the relationship between these landscape measures and key abiotic and biotic processes, and quantify how they vary across spatial scales; 3) Validate these models using data from previous UKRI and Defra investments ('study landscapes'); 4) Quantify likely change in demand for and supply of natural capital and ecosystem services, including food production, within intensively farmed landscapes taking account of alternative trajectories of land-use change; 5) Using this knowledge, create tools to support cross-departmental policy makers in the design of future 'multi-functional landscapes' to optimise, at multiple scales, the delivery of food production together with other key ecosystem functions linked to livelihoods and well-being.
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