Biodiversity is essential for agroecosystem resilience, sustainability, and long-term food security. Traditionally, management for short-term economic returns has taken priority over management for environmental health. Current mechanisms for compensating and encouraging farmers to apply biodiversity-sensitive management strategies are often inefficient, being applied at the individual farm rather than landscape level, and tend to be generic solutions, imposed from the top down at an EU or national level. Biodiversity impact monitoring is rarely carried out and there is therefore little scope for evaluating the success of strategies in achieving improvements to farmland biodiversity. Farmers and rural communities are often not empowered through existing processes. 

The FRAMEwork project promotes a novel alternative - the FRAMEwork System for Biodiversity Sensitive Farming to enable the transition of EU farming systems to a position where they can conserve biodiversity and benefit from valuing ecosystem services while mitigating agronomic or economic risks.  

This information hub – “Recodo” – is an open access online platform to support FRAMEwork networks, facilitating the sharing of activities, information, data and resources across farmers, scientists, policy makers, and citizens. It hosts the FRAMEwork Advanced Farmer Cluster network online and provides necessary tools to promote the creation and maintenance of new FC networks beyond the life of the project. It is also an online knowledge and information space, integrating different resources, from citizen science training tools and materials for biodiversity monitoring to linking to important project resources and applications, such as the Farmer Cluster guidelines, EIP Practice Abstracts, Decision Support Tools, virtual training tools, as well as external resources. It provides access to newly generated data sets of the project and offers data insights and stories from the Famer Clusters. 

The Farmer Cluster network and resources stretch across the European continent and include different climatic zones, landscape types and agrifood business contexts. The Recodo brand takes inspiration especially from collaborators in Southern Spain, where the agrifood system is one of the most acutely threatened by biodiversity loss and associated environmental challenges of global heating and desertification.

“Recodo” is Spanish for 'turn' or 'loop' and often used for describing a bend in a river. These meanings echo this platform’s aim to bring together a community of stakeholders working to leverage ecosystem services and value biodiversity. Together, we can support one another on the journey to a more sustainable food system.

The FRAMEwork project is coordinated by the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, UK. It's delivered by an international consortium of Research Organisations, NGOs, and values-led companies. The Recodo platform is provided by the International Institute of Research Analysis (IIASA) with branding by Taskscape Associates Ltd. Our thanks to the whole consortium for their contributions to the ongoing development of the platform. Before using Recodo, please consider the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

You can find more information about FRAMEwork on the project’s website: https://www.framework-biodiversity.eu/