3Q Programme

The changing input data, requirements and desired outputs and monitoring variables makes the creation of a long term monitoring programme incredibly complex. The 3Q Programme worked by analysing aerial photography, with 1474 1x1 km2 squares, of which 70% were sampled because budgets prohibited them all to be sampled. Squares were sampled every 5 years but in reality slightly longer to allow for the photographic survey to be completed. Using land use analysis from the aerial photography and the agricultural census the results were scaled up from the 1km squares to the county level using a scaling factor calculated from the relationship between the total area of agricultural land in the county, as measured through agricultural census, and the area of agricultural land in the 3Q sample squares from that county. Field survey work was added to the monitoring programme to test the relationship between the map based indicators and the four themes of interest. The Norwegian 3Q monitoring programme has been running for 20 years, providing information about Norwegian agricultural landscapes. 3Q has raised awareness of landscape issues in Norway and has contributed to the development of national and regional agri-environmental programmes. The methods chosen for data collection have proven effective and effcient, and the aerial photographs provide a valuable record of agricultural landscape content and composition that can be referred to and analyzed in new ways in the future. Advances in technology and the development of other official databases have increased the amount of data available and brought down the costs of monitoring.