Abstract
Agricultural ecosystems provide humans with food, forage, bioenergy and pharmaceuticals and are essential to human wellbeing. These systems rely on ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems, including pollination, biological pest control, maintenance of soil structure and fertility, nutrient cycling and hydrological services. Preliminary assessments indicate that the value of these ecosystem services to agriculture is enormous and often underappreciated. Agroecosystems also produce a variety of ecosystem services, such as regulation of soil and water quality, carbon sequestration, support for biodiversity and cultural services. Depending on management practices, agriculture can also be the source of numerous disservices, including loss of wildlife habitat, nutrient runoff, sedimentation of waterways, greenhouse gas emissions, and pesticide poisoning of humans and non-target species. The tradeoffs that may occur between provisioning services and other ecosystem services and disservices should be evaluated in terms of spatial scale, temporal scale and reversibility. As more effective methods for valuing ecosystem services become available, the potential for ‘win–win’ scenarios increases. Under all scenarios, appropriate agricultural management practices are critical to realizing the benefits of ecosystem services and reducing disservices from agricultural activities.
Highlights
Agriculture is a dominant form of land management globally, and agricultural ecosystems cover nearly 40 per cent of the terrestrial surface of the Earth (FAO 2009)
Just as conversion from natural ecosystems to agriculture can reduce the flow of certain ecosystem services, the intensification of agriculture (Matson et al 1997) or the conversion of agroecosystems to urban or suburban development can further degrade the provision of beneficial services
There was no evidence that the provisioning services provided by agriculture were jeopardized by modifying the system to improve its ability to provide other ecological services. These analyses suggest that it may be possible to manage agroecosystems to support many ecosystem services while still maintaining or enhancing the provisioning services that agroecosystems were designed to produce
Summary
Agriculture is a dominant form of land management globally, and agricultural ecosystems cover nearly 40 per cent of the terrestrial surface of the Earth (FAO 2009). Influenced by human management, ecosystem processes within agricultural systems can provide services that support the provisioning services, including pollination, pest control, genetic diversity for future agricultural use, soil retention, regulation of soil fertility and nutrient cycling. Ecosystem services farm management tillage crop diversity field size crop rotation cover cropping agroecosystem provisioning services food fibre bioenergy agricultural ecosystem services ecosystem services pest control pollination nutrient re/cycling soil conservation, structure and fertility water provision, quality and quantity carbon sequestration biodiversity landscape management windbreaks hedgerows riparian vegetation natural habitat patches landscape matrix ecosystem disservices loss of biodiversity loss of wildlife habitat nutrient runoff sedimentation of waterways pesticide poisoning greenhouse gas emissions. Functioning agroecosystems include, among others, annual crop monocultures, temperate perennial orchards, grazing systems, arid-land pastoral systems, tropical shifting cultivation systems, smallholder mixed cropping systems, paddy rice systems, tropical plantations (e.g. oil palm, coffee, cacao), agroforestry systems and species-rich home gardens This variety of agricultural systems results in a highly variable assortment and quantity of ecosystem services. Just as conversion from natural ecosystems to agriculture can reduce the flow of certain ecosystem services, the intensification of agriculture (Matson et al 1997) or the conversion of agroecosystems to urban or suburban development can further degrade the provision of beneficial services
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