Generally not. The farmland bird index is designed to paint a broad-scale picture of the state of farmland biodiversity caused by the overall performance of agri-environmental schemes. More detailed and experimental monitoring protocols are demanded to measure the effectiveness of specific, fine-scale agri-environmental measures based upon clear ecological hypotheses and tailored to the specific targets of each agri-environmental measure. These studies need a careful design with replicates, test and control plots, and measurements before and after treatments. They will usually focus on a small set of target species (or even a single species). In some cases, however, common farmland bird monitoring results may be useful to assess the effectiveness of a measure if the measure in question is being implemented at an extensive scale (e.g. reducing pesticide inputs across entire farms). There are enough sample plots in farms where the measure is being taken to compare with those where it is not.