Abstract
Vineyards shape important economic, cultural, and ecological systems in many temperate biomes. Like other agricultural systems, they can be multifunctional landscapes that not only produce grapes, but also for example serve as wildlife habitat, sequester carbon, and are places of rich traditions. However, research and management practices often focus mostly on individual, specific ecosystem services, without considering multifunctionality. Therefore, we set out to meet four research objectives: (1) evaluate how frequently the ecosystem services approach has been applied in vineyard systems; (2) identify which individual ecosystem services have been most frequently studied in vineyard systems, (3) summarize knowledge on the key ecosystem services identified in (2), and (4) illustrate approaches to multifunctionality in vineyards to inform more holistic land management. For research objective (1), we identified 45 publications that used the term “ecosystem services” in relation to vineyards, but found that only seven fully apply the ecosystem service concept to their research. For research objective (2), we operationalized the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES) for 27 ecosystem services in vineyards, in order to consider provisioning, regulating, and cultural services through an analysis of more than 4,000 scientific papers that mentioned individual services. We found the six most frequently studied ecosystem services included (1) cultivated crop, (2) filtration, sequestration, storage and accumulation by the vineyards, (3) pest control and (4) disease control, (5) heritage, cultural and (6) scientific services. For research objective (3), we found that research on these six single ecosystem services is highly developed, but relationships between single ecosystem services are less studied. Therefore, we suggest that greater adoption of the ecosystem services approach could help scientists and practitioners to acknowledge the multifunctionality of the agricultural system and gain a holistic perspective that supports more sustainable land management.
Highlights
Agricultural landscapes provide a multitude of services and benefits to people and nature (Lovell and Taylor, 2013; Galler et al, 2015), including their critical roles in food production, and to enhance rural livelihoods and ensure functional ecosystems (Hart et al, 2016)
When looking at correlations among the publications identified for two single ecosystem service classes, we found that the single service classes most likely to appear in a publication with another service class were cultivated crops (28% of the papers that studied cultivated crops studied another service) and scientific (22% overlap; Table 3, Supplementary Table 1)
Our findings show that the ecosystem services concept has not often been used in research on vineyards
Summary
Agricultural landscapes provide a multitude of services and benefits to people and nature (Lovell and Taylor, 2013; Galler et al, 2015), including their critical roles in food production, and to enhance rural livelihoods and ensure functional ecosystems (Hart et al, 2016). Multifunctional landscapes are often more resilient to ecosystem shocks and disturbances, such as human-induced changes like deforestation, or climate-induced environmental variation (DeClerck et al, 2016) They provide a wider range of services, which can be beneficial when reacting to future challenges, such as climate change or water scarcity, as they can either buffer disturbances or offer alternatives to current situations (Lovell and Taylor, 2013). Many ecosystem service studies identify, quantify, and evaluate a single identified service, such as carbon sequestration, without considering the impact on related services (Seppelt et al, 2011; Lee and Lautenbach, 2016) This single-minded focus, either in scientific inquiry or management activity, neglects the importance of the range of services and benefits the land can provide if managed holistically
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