1 INTRODUCTION Payments that incentivize land users to implement biodiversity-enhancing land use measures have become an important policy instrument for biodiversity conservation (Engel, 2016). However, these payments for land use measures have often been criticized for their lack of conservation success especially in Europe and the US, where they are often implemented as agri-environmental schemes (Batáry et al., 2015; Khanna et al., 2018; Wätzold et al., 2016).