Conservation of biodiversity can benefit agriculture through its provisioning of supporting ecosystem services. It is therefore argued that ecological intensification - whereby farmers implement measures to boost flows of ecosystem services - could be used to replace environmentally damaging inputs and hence boost yields and incomes while simultaneously reducing environmental degradation.

Evaluating the potential of ecological intensification to meet this challenge is however far from straight-forward. Ecological-economic modelling can be used to investigate the complex interactions between famers’ land-use decisions and impacts on ecosystem services. Further it makes it possible to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of different policy responses.

Here we develop an ecological-economic optimization that considers the impacts of farmers’ land-use decisions on flows of above- and below-ground ecosystem services, and the concomitant impacts on production and incomes. Further the model has been calibrated to the Liberation project’s seven, pan-European, case-study landscapes to reproduce observed production decisions (land-use, crop areas and input use) in each landscape.

The main focus has been on developing and calibrating the optimization model for each landscape to economic data while using preliminary parameter values for the ecosystemservice production functions to generate some exploratory results. Hence the presented results are purely exploratory.

In the next step we will link our models with the multiple production function developed in WP 4 to validate our results and test their sensitivity to changing conditions.