Concerns about global environmental change challenge long term ecological research (LTER) to go beyond traditional disciplinary scientific research to produce knowledge that can guide society toward more sustainable development. Reporting the outcomes of a 2 d interdisciplinary workshop, this article proposes novel concepts to substantially expand LTER by including the human dimension. We feel that such an integration warrants the insertion of a new letter in the acronym, changing it from LTER to LTSER, "Long-Term Socioecological Research," with a focus on coupled socioecological systems. We discuss scientific challenges such as the necessity to link biophysical processes to governance and communication, the need to consider patterns and processes across several spatial and temporal scales, and the difficulties of combining data from in-situ measurements with statistical data, cadastral surveys, and soft knowledge from the humanities. We stress the importance of including prefossil fuel system baseline data as well as maintaining the often delicate balance between monitoring and predictive or explanatory modeling. Moreover, it is challenging to organize a continuous process of cross-fertilization between rich descriptive and causal-analytic local case studies and theory/modeling-oriented generalizations. Conceptual insights are used to derive conclusions for the design of infrastructures needed for long-term socioecological research.
a b s t r a c tEnergy balances of farm systems have overlooked the role of energy flows that remain within agroecosystems. Yet, such internal flows fulfil important socio-ecological functions, including maintenance of farmers themselves and agro-ecosystem structures. Farming can either give rise to complex landscapes that favour associated biodiversity, or the opposite. This variability can be understood by assessing several types of Energy Returns on Investment (EROI). Applying these measures to a farm system in Catalonia, Spain in 1860 and in 1999, reveals the expected decrease in the ratio of final energy output to total and external inputs. The transition from solar-based to a fossil fuel based agro-ecosystem was further accompanied by an increase in the ratio of final energy output to biomass reused, as well as an absolute increase of Unharvested Phytomass grown in derelict forestland. The study reveals an apparent link between reuse of biomass and the decrease of landscape heterogeneity along with its associated biodiversity.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tens of millions of Europeans migrated to the Americas. Many traded rural lives for industrial jobs in growing cities, while a significant number travelled west to make farms on the Great Plains. Using case studies from Austria and Kansas, this paper compares the socioecological structures of the agricultural communities immigrants left to those that they found and created on the other side of the Atlantic. It employs material and energy flow accounting (MEFA) methods to examine the social metabolic similarities and differences between Old World and New World farm systems at either end of the migration chain. Nine indicators reveal significant differences in land use strategy, labor deployment, and the role of livestock. Indicators include population density, average farm size, land availability, grain yield, area productivity, labor productivity, marketable crop production, livestock density, and nitrogen return to cropland. Whereas Old World farms had abundant human and animal labor and a shortage of land, Great Plains farms had excess land and a shortage of labor and livestock. Austrian farmers returned over 90% of extracted nitrogen to cropland, thus sustaining soils over many generations, but they produced little marketable crop surplus. A key difference was livestock density. Old World communities kept more animals than they needed for food and labor, primarily to supply manure that maintained cropland fertility. Great Plains farmers used few animals to exploit rich grassland soils, returning less than half of the nitrogen they extracted each year. Farmers depleted soil fertility over six decades, relying on a stockpiled endowment of nitrogen. They produced stupendous surpluses for market export, but watched crop yields decline steadily between 1880 and 1940. Austrian immigrants to Kansas in the late nineteenth century found that their return on labor could increase by 20 times over what they were used to. But by the early twentieth century Austrian productivity had increased while in Kansas it dropped steadily lower. Both farm systems were efficient in their own way, one producing long-term stability, the other remarkable commercial exports. Kansas farmers faced a soil nutrient crisis by the 1940s, one that was solved in the second half of the twentieth century by the massive importation of fossil fuels. Austrian and Great Plains agriculture converged thereafter, with dramatically increased productivity based on oil, diesel fuel, petroleum-based pesticides, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers manufactured from natural gas.
Energy efficiency in biomass production is a major challenge for a future transition to sustainable food and energy provision. This study uses methodologically consistent data on agroecosystem energy flows and different metrics of energetic efficiency from seven regional case studies in North America (USA and Canada) and Europe (Spain and Austria) to investigate energy transitions in Western agroecosystems from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. We quantify indicators such as external final energy return on investment (EFEROI, i.e., final produce per unit of external energy input), internal final EROI (IFEROI, final produce per unit of biomass reused locally), and final EROI (FEROI, final produce per unit of total inputs consumed). The transition is characterized by increasing final produce accompanied by increasing external energy inputs and stable local biomass reused. External inputs did not replace internal biomass reinvestments, but added to them. The results were declining EFEROI, stable or increasing IFEROI, and diverging trends in FEROI. The factors shaping agroecosystem energy profiles changed in the course of the transition: Under advanced organic and frontier agriculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, population density and biogeographic conditions explained both agroecosystem productivity and energy inputs. In industrialized agroecosystems, biogeographic conditions and specific socio-economic factors influenced trends towards increased agroecosystem specialization. The share of livestock products in a region's final produce was the most important factor determining energy returns on investment.Keywords Agroecosystem energy transition . Long-term socio-ecological research . Energy return on investment . Energy efficiency Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi
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