Softwaregestütztes Naturschutzmanagement auf Landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben - Erfassung, Bewertung und Optimierung von Naturschutzleistungen

So far there is hardly any organisational assistance for farmers implementing nature conservation measures. A newly developed software now provides the opportunity to assist farmers in recording, evaluating and improving nature conservation measures. The system called MANUELA on the one hand includes methods and tools for the documentation and management of obligations resulting from good farming practice and cross compliance. On the other hand, additional environmental conservation measures of farmers supporting species, bio-topes, landscape aesthetics and recreation can be evaluated and supported. Finally, a tool to calculate the costs of landscape conservation measures has been included. MANUELA has been developed on the basis of the existing farm assessment system REPRO, including an interface to allow the import and use of present farm operation data from REPRO. The open source geographical information system (GIS) Open-Jump was basically used to implement MANUELA. OpenJump already provides a set of spatial analysis tools allowing the use for other purposes as well. As the attractiveness of nature conservation measures for farmers is increasing - particularly due to a reorientation and higher effectiveness of EU-subsidies - MANUELA will become increasingly relevant for farmers.