Nature Conservation Value of European Mountain Farming Systems

High nature value (HNV) farming areas are regarded as farmland where there are intimate relationships between farming practices and biodiversity and where the continuation of those farming practices is essential for the maintenance of this biodiversity value (e.g. Bignal 1998; Luick 1998; Ostermann 1998; Webb 1998; Zervas 1998). By the mid 1990s, there was a growing recognition that particular farming systems (many of them in mountainous areas) were important in maintaining nature conservation value over much of the wider European countryside, but it was also recognised that there was little information available on the range of such systems being practised across Europe. To redress some of this imbalance, the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) funded a pilot study of nine European countries: Greece, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom (Beaufoy et al. 1994; Bignal et al. 1994b; Bignal and McCracken 1996a,b; 2000).