A new paper is out in Conservation Letters on conservation strategies in traditional farming landscapes, such as those still found widely across Eastern Europe. Many of these landscapes are rapidly disappearing, at least in part because of the EU eastward expansion. With a major Common Agricultural Policy reform upcoming, we argue that policy making should focus more on the links between the social and ecological subsystems rather than breaking these links as can happen when people are simply paid (via subsidies) to maintain traditional land use practices.

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