Through the last six decades, agricultural landscapes in Europe changed dramatically (Stoate 2001; Jongman 2002; Klijn 2004; Tscharntke et al. 2005). After World War II, the large-scale application of synthetic fertilizers and mechanization allowed the intensive cultivation of poor and unstable soils and in several European countries land consolidation policies were adopted to further increase production, with large consequences for landscape structure and composition (Klijn 2004). During the same period, production support by the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) aimed at self-sufficiency of agricultural production became the major incentive for intensification of agriculture. In the UK, for instance, results of agricultural intensification were a sharp increase in crop yields (by threefold in the case of wheat production). At the same time, it was estimated that 97 % of the enclosed grasslands were lost between 1930 and 1984 as a results of land consolidation or through conversion to arable land (UK National Ecosystem Assessment 2011). Since the 1990s, the CAP is transforming from a production support subsidy system towards an income support subsidy system (Lowe et al. 2002). The changes in the CAP, in combination with an increased globalization of agricultural commodity markets, have stimulated farmers to increase production efficiency in order to be competitive on the world market. The need for increased cost-efficiency of agriculture has again led to changes in agricultural management, directly or indirectly altering the characteristics of European landscapes (Lefebvre et al. 2012). Consequences of this increase in production efficiency are further intensification of agricultural management, scale enlargement of farms and fields and the abandonment of marginal agricultural areas. All three processes lead, under most circumstances, to a homogenization of landscape, either by creating larger scale agricultural areas with sparse landscape elements, or by the re-growth of more continuous forest areas in more marginal, mosaic-type, landscapes (Jongman 2002; Klijn 2004). However, large spatial diversity in these processes occurs throughout Europe (Verburg et al. 2009) as there are large spatial differences in the environmental and social–cultural context, land use history and institutional setting. In a number of former socialist countries, post-socialist land transformation led to fragmentation of large-scale farming, while in Western Europe farm and parcel sizes are continuously increasing. At the same time, decreasing profitability of farming resulted in both Western and Eastern Europe in abandonment of farmland (e.g., Kuemmerle et al. 2008; Verburg et al. 2009; Renwick et al. 2013).