EMBAL - European Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes

The 'European Monitoring of Biodiversity in Agricultural Landscapes' (EMBAL) is a monitoring initiative initiated by the European Commission that gathers information on the state of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes across EU member states. Developed within the EU Pollinator Monitoring Framework, EMBAL is a standardized and sample-based in-situ survey of 500x500m landscape sections (plots).EMBAL provides comprehensive data, including general information on land use and land cover at parcel level, information about landscape elements, and specific vegetation data on a transect level in grassland and arable habitats. Both the methodology and the sampling frame are harmonized with LUCAS (Land Use and Coverage Area frame Survey).Following a successful pilot in 2020, EMBAL was applied in all 27 EU member states in 2022 and 2023, surveying a total of 3,000 selected plots in both years. This extensive rollout served to gather harmonised baseline data on biodiversity across EU27 and provided a comprehensive field test of the EMBAL methodology across different European landscapes.In this contribution, we offer an overview of the EMBAL 2022 and 2023 rollout, the EMBAL survey methods and parameters and provide an outlook on the results.