Special issues

 

The objective of this special issue is to bring together papers that explore whether and how diversity and diversification can contribute to more sustainable and resilient agricultural landscape systems worldwide. Diversification is understood to have agro-ecological, technological, environmental and socio-economic elements and impacts.

Promising approaches to diversification include

1. new and neglected field arrangements e.g. diverse rotations, integration of legumes, intercropping, patch or pixel cropping, agroforestry,
2. diversified farming systems e.g. mixed crop-livestock systems, and alternative social models e.g. care farming,
3. digitalized and traditional technologies, and
4. diversified value chains.

These systems aim to reduce trade-offs between high productivity and sustainable use of external resources especially reducing pesticide use, improving soil health and the provisioning of ecosystem services, including social and cultural values and economic perspectives. We call for papers that address diversification for providing sustainable solutions at different scales from cropping and grassland to food systems. We especially welcome papers investigating processes at the landscape or territorial scale where synergies and trade-offs between social and environmental objectives become most tangible. Contributions can include research from natural and social sciences, while inter- and transdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.

Editors:
Moritz Reckling, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany
Christine Watson, SRUC (Scotland's Rural College), UK & Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Sweden
Anthony Whitbread, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Tanzania
Katharina Helming, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Germany

 

The decline of biodiversity and associated services in agricultural systems has prompted research aiming at designing biodiversity-friendly practices at a field-scale. However, there is today increasing evidence that effective conservation of biodiversity and provision of related ecosystem services requires the modification of farming practices at a landscape scale. Promising approaches include landscape scale diversification of land use systems, including the spatial expansion of agro-ecological or integrated cropping systems and of agri-environmental schemes within cropped fields or in the surroundings of fields. While landscape-scale strategies could yield additive or synergetic biodiversity benefits, the impact of an expansion of biodiversity-friendly practices and their potential complementarity for fostering biodiversity at the landscape scale remains poorly documented. Moreover, the co-design and successful implementation of landscape scale strategies represents a paradigm shift for researchers, practitioners and decision-makers. It requires adopting an integrative socio-ecological framework that considers stakeholders acceptability, as well as the potential or need for coordination and organizational innovations.The objective of this special issue is to bring together papers that explore the mechanisms that can foster landscape-scale transformation of agricultural management as well as the impact of such changes on biodiversity and associated services. We call for papers that could focus on guiding principles, methods and tools to co-design agro-ecological landscapes as well as papers presenting empirical or scenario-based case studies of the implementation of landscape-scale strategies and their impact on biodiversity and associated services. We seek contributions from natural and social sciences and inter- and transdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.

Guest editors:
Sandrine Petit, National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), France
Douglas Landis, Michigan State University, USA