
Henrik Smith
Professor

Optimizing intermediate ecosystem services in agriculture using rules based on landscape composition and configuration indices
Författare
Summary, in English
Important intermediate ecosystem services (ES) such as crop pollination and biological control of pests, which underpin the final ES agricultural yields, are mediated by mobile organisms that depend on availability of habitat and its arrangement in the landscape. It has been suggested that landscape-scale management (LSM) of habitat in a multi-farm setting results in higher provisioning of such ES compared to farm-scale management (FSM). However, to achieve the LSM solution, farmers' land-use decisions need to be coordinated. To this end, we develop rules based on novel landscape composition and configuration indices. We model farmers' interdependencies through ES in an agent-based model (ABM) and optimize land use at both the farm and landscape scales for comparison. Our analysis is based on a simple artificial landscape with homogeneous soil quality and uses crop pollination as an illustrative ecosystem service. We consider habitat configuration at the field scale. Our rules demonstrate that the coordinated solution is characterized by a higher degree of habitat availability and a configuration of habitat that is dispersed rather than agglomerated. We tested these rules over a range of assumptions about ecological parameter values and suggest that such rules could be used to improve governance of ES in agricultural landscapes.
Avdelning/ar
- Centrum för miljö- och klimatvetenskap (CEC)
- BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
Publiceringsår
2016-08-01
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
214-223
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
Ecological Economics
Volym
128
Länkar
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Elsevier
Ämne
- Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Nyckelord
- Agent-based model
- Agglomeration
- Agri-environmental policy
- Dispersion
- Governance
- Pollination
Status
Published
Projekt
- Rural development through governance of multifunctional agricultural land-use
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 0921-8009