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.