Austrian Biodiversity Monitoring ÖBM Cultural Landscape.

Biodiversity monitoring is essential to detect changes in the quality and quantity of biodiversity components, to derive concrete measures for the conservation of biodiversity and to evaluate the effectiveness of these measures. This study presents the results of the first complete implementation of the Austrian Biodiversity Monitoring of the Open Cultural Landscape (OeBM – Kulturlandschaft) from 2017/18. It covers the entire federal territory by means of 100 test areas, which contain a total of 1,000 test circuits for the organismic surveys. In the field surveys, 298 different biotope types, 1,419 vascular plant species, 76 locust species and 129 butterfly species were detected, and remote sensing provided other important biodiversity-relevant variables on land cover, ecosystem structure and function.