Importance of monitoring agri-environmental indicators highlighted in new publication

A new publication entitled "Building agri-environmental indicators : focussing on the European area frame survey LUCAS" has been released today. The product of a collaboration between the European Environment Agency, the Agriculture and Environment Directorate-Generals, Eurostat, and the Joint Research Centre, the publication focuses on use of the Land Use/Cover Area Frame Statistical Survey (LUCAS) for building landscape and agri-environmental indicators. It also extends the analysis of independent and joint use of land cover information, administrative data and geo-referenced statistical surveys which are important for providing information on fluxes, stocks and pressure indicators and explores data sets EU-wide. Topics range from specific ones, i.e. bird diversity, to a complete land cover classification. The results of the survey found that existing data sets already contain a lot of information leading to the computation of agri-environmental indicators, and that intensification of a LUCAS type survey appears as a leading objective. It also observes that the integration of different data sets is possible and stresses the importance of data being available at periodic intervals. For the full publication, please see : http://agrienv.jrc.it/publications/ECpubs/agri-ind/