Designing multifunctional and resilient agricultural landscapes: lessons from long-term monitoring of biodiversity and land use
Résumé
In this chapter, we illustrate how the current challenges of agriculture - i.e. maintaining food security while preserving biodiversity, landscapes and ecosystem functions - have been addressed in a long-term social-ecological research site, the Zone Atelier Plaine & Val de Sèvre, operated since 1994. After a presentation of the study area and its research program, we present landscape changes over the past 25 years. Then, we review the most relevant studies conducted in this area that examined the effect of landscape on farmland biodiversity.We focus on biodiversity because it is a central tenet of sustainable agriculture, which delivers ecosystem services that benefit human well-being and ensure ecosystem stability and resilience. Finally, we show that approaches that sustain biodiversity can also support food production, the delivery of multiple ecosystem services and the economy of local stakeholders. One major result from studies in the LTSER ZA-PVS is that biodiversity decline is a severe threat to food security in itself: improving biodiversity can improve yields, gross margins, or both. Biodiversity in arable habitats is, therefore, required to maintain food security, especially through pollination, natural pest regulation and soil services. Long-term monitoring of biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and agricultural practices as well as land use revealed that the interplay between local and landscape factors can provide solutions to reach these goals of multifunctionality (biodiversity, food production and farmers’ profitability) in agricultural landscapes. The next step is to engage stakeholders, in collaboration with scientists, and increase awareness of their mutual interdependencies with nature to foster the transition to more agroecological farming.