The paper develops a method to estimate the additional effect of rural development measures on the contribution of farming to biodiversity, using regional and local data. Indicators derived from the High Nature Value (HNV) concept were elaborated from data available at different spatial resolution: LAU2 for the Netherlands and LAU1 for France. The effect of rural development measures on the evolution of these indicators between 2007 and 2010 is explored. Significant effects are found in French situations, while no strong evidence arose from the Dutch case-study. French results indicate that measures from both rural development programming periods affect the changes in the indicators, and the spatial scale of the analyses matters. An analysis on the EU as a whole is proved not possible due a lack of data at an appropriate resolution. ; JRC.H.4 - Monitoring Agricultural Resources