Building capacities for the design of agroecological landscapes: The added-value of Landscape Monitoring Networks

Abstract

The evidence that most agricultural landscapes are failing to deliver on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services provision suggests that future landscapes will need to be more explicitly designed. Although recent research has produced a number of ecological and social principles that should form the basis of agricultural landscape design process, implementation is still in its infancy. One difficulty is the context-dependency of ecological responses and the resulting limiting capacity to predict the benefits of landscape transformation for the targeted organisms or services. In addition, there is a poor understanding of the obstacles to and levers for the implementation of collective management at the landscape scale. In this paper, we argue that Landscape Monitoring Networks (LMN), i.e. long-term and standardized monitoring of ecological and managerial processes within a set of replicated regional landscapes, can contribute to tackling these issues. We first present the current challenges in designing agroecological landscapes before outlining the principles of LMN and how these research facilities could help deliver ecological and social understanding along a gradient from place-based to generic knowledge. We then discuss critical issues that need to be solved to ensure that LMN delivers relevant knowledge for landscape design. We illustrate this through the experience of an ongoing LMN that was created in France in 2014 to address biodiversity and pest control services in agricultural landscapes.