What can 65 volunteers tell us about an entire landscape?
Hedgerows, tree lines, ditches and ponds may look like small details on a map. Ecologically, however, together they form the green-blue networks that provide habitats and connections across agricultural landscapes.
In the Dutch province of Utrecht, the Meet je Landschap — or Measure Your Landscape — initiative has spent more than a decade documenting these landscape elements.
Initiated in 2013 by Landschap Erfgoed Utrecht (LEU), the initiative mobilises a network of around 65 volunteers, equipped with tablets, to systematically record the presence and quality of landscape features across the province.
By the end of 2024, their work had produced something unprecedented in the Netherlands: a comprehensive baseline map of the agricultural landscape of an entire province.
But the importance of Meet je Landschap goes beyond the map itself. For DAISY, the initiative provides a valuable example of how social participation, digital technology and governance can reinforce one another — and of what is needed for a promising local innovation to become part of a wider system of biodiversity governance.
More than a technological innovation
DAISY is a Horizon Europe research and innovation project examining how combinations of digital, technological and social innovations can contribute to transformative change for biodiversity and equity.
A central idea behind the project is that innovations rarely create systemic change on their own. Their effects depend on the institutions around them, the people who use them, the incentives that support them and the relationships of trust that allow them to function.
DAISY therefore studies Transformative Intervention Mixes, or TIMs: combinations of social, technological and governance interventions that can work together to overcome barriers and accelerate wider transformation.
Meet je Landschap illustrates this particularly clearly.
Its achievements cannot be attributed to a single new technology or policy. They have emerged from the interaction of committed volunteers, increasingly sophisticated digital tools, long-term institutional support and changing policy priorities.
From paper maps to a province-wide dataset
The initiative began at a moment when newly available ArcGIS technology created new opportunities for organising landscape monitoring.
Earlier fieldwork relied on paper maps, dots, lines and extensive handwritten notes. The introduction of digital tools gradually transformed the process. Tablet-based field recording and cloud synchronisation enabled volunteers to collect information remotely and integrate it into a shared dataset much more efficiently.
Technology, however, is only part of the story.
The initiative depends on people being willing to spend time in the field, learn monitoring methods and remain involved over many years. Volunteers are motivated not only by meaningful outdoor work, but also by recognition and by seeing the tangible results of their contribution through maps, dashboards and visualisations.
This combination of citizen participation and digital infrastructure has enabled the initiative to operate at a scale that neither could easily achieve alone.
When monitoring becomes policy infrastructure
Institutional support has been equally important.
The Province of Utrecht has structurally embedded funding for Meet je Landschap within LEU’s annual operating subsidy, giving the initiative an unusual degree of long-term stability.
At the same time, landscape monitoring has become increasingly relevant to wider biodiversity policy. The Dutch national ambition to achieve 10% green-blue veining in rural areas, incorporated into the 2023 Nationaal Programma Landelijk Gebied (NPLG), gave the work additional policy relevance and helped stimulate new cooperation with farmers and the regional water board.
The resulting dataset can show not only where ecological landscape elements are located, but also their condition and where restoration efforts may be most useful.
In this sense, citizen science begins to become something more than participation in research. It can become infrastructure for evidence-based biodiversity policy.
Progress does not remove fragility
The case also shows why successful innovations should not automatically be assumed to be secure.
Meet je Landschap remains dependent on a relatively small group of highly skilled and motivated people. Changes in personnel can therefore have a disproportionate effect on the network.
The loss of national NPLG funding in 2024 also removed an important policy anchor, although provincial support has continued.
There are further tensions around data, responsibilities and funding. Agricultural collectives hold subsidies for creating some landscape elements, while LEU provides specialist monitoring data. Commercial consultancies working for public authorities may also request access to LEU’s data, creating a difficult balance between collaboration, open information and protecting organisational expertise.
And, as with any volunteer-based initiative, continued recruitment and long-term engagement cannot be taken for granted.
These challenges underline a wider lesson for transformative innovation: successful experiments need durable institutions if they are to become durable systems.
What could the future look like?
DAISY’s exploration of the case looks beyond what Meet je Landschap has already achieved towards what a more integrated system of landscape monitoring could become.
Satellite-based monitoring could increasingly complement qualitative observations made in the field. New apps could simplify data collection, while techniques such as environmental DNA (eDNA) could provide additional ecological information. Cooperation with the water board could extend monitoring further into the “blue” parts of the landscape, including ditches and other aquatic features.
Citizen science would remain central, but monitoring could connect much more directly with restoration and landscape management.
Nature-friendly ditch banks and flower-rich verges could become more widespread. Ecological connectivity could improve. Water quality and invasive species management could be addressed more systematically.
Farmers would also need to be treated as partners in the transition. Fair and reliable compensation for biodiversity-friendly land management could align ecological objectives with agricultural livelihoods, supported by public funding and potentially by actors elsewhere in agricultural supply chains.
Technology needs institutions — and trust
Reaching such a future requires more than a better monitoring platform.
Clear responsibilities are needed across provinces, municipalities, water boards, landscape organisations, farmers and other actors. Dedicated coordination and longer funding cycles could make cooperation more stable, while pilot areas could allow emerging monitoring approaches to be tested without waiting for every technical question to be resolved.
Trust is just as important.
Relationships between institutions and farmers can be strengthened through field visits, transparent communication and monitoring results that are visible and useful to everyone involved. Volunteers also need to see that their contribution has an impact and that the information they collect is actually being used.
The lesson is simple but important: better data can support better decisions only when people trust the systems producing, sharing and using that data.
From a successful initiative to systemic change
Meet je Landschap demonstrates why transformative change rarely comes from one intervention alone.
The volunteer network provides local knowledge, commitment and field capacity. Digital tools allow that effort to produce consistent data at provincial scale. Institutional funding creates continuity. Cooperation between public authorities, farmers and landscape organisations connects monitoring with action. Emerging technologies create new possibilities for expanding what can be observed.
Each element matters, but their combination matters more.
This is precisely what makes the initiative relevant to DAISY’s work on Transformative Intervention Mixes. Its evolution shows how citizen engagement, technology and governance can develop together — and how a regional monitoring initiative can begin to move from a successful niche project towards a broader model for biodiversity governance.
The Meet je Landschap seed case study was researched by Rosalie van Dam and Irini Salverda of Wageningen University & Research as part of DAISY’s work identifying and understanding seeds of transformative change.
Want to explore the drivers, obstacles and transformation potential in more detail?
Explore the complete Meet je Landschap seed case study on mydaisy.eu
