Modeling trade-offs among ecosystem services in agricultural production systems

Abstract

Although agricultural ecosystems can provide humans with a wide set of benefits agricultural production system management is mainly driven by food production. As a consequence, a need to ensure food security globally has been accompanied by a significant decline in the state of ecosystems. In order to reduce negative trade-offs and identify potential synergies it is necessary to improve our understanding of the relationships between various ecosystem services (ES) as well as the impacts of farm management on ES provision. We present a spatially explicit application that captures and quantifies ES trade-offs in the crop systems of Llanada Alavesa in the Basque Country. Our analysis presents a quantitative assessment of selected ES including crop yield, water supply and quality, climate regulation and air quality. The study is conducted using semantic meta-modeling, a technique that enables flexible integration of models to overcome the service-by-service modeling approach applied traditionally in ES assessment.

Agricultural production systems modelling and software: Current status and future prospects

“…In modelling more complex systems, there is also increased demand for improved methods to model or consider management decisions as described by Martin-Clouaire et al (2014) and Moore et al (2014). It seems likely that this emergence of more complex modelling problems has partially arisen from increased capability of the simulation models and their user interfaces, but it is also likely that as we address emerging issues associated with ecosystem services (Balbi et al, 2014;Le et al, 2014) in the face of climate change.…”

“…These ranged from spatial issues, from small areas of heterogeneity caused by the behaviour of grazing animals , to the need for multi-paddock simulations to capture farm performance when that performance is dependent on the interaction of several paddocks rather than just the aggregation of many single paddocks Holzworth et al, 2014;Moore et al, 2014), to several papers (Balbi et al, 2014;Elliott et al, 2014;Kang et al, 2014;Le et al, 2014;Machwitz et al, 2014;McNider et al, 2014;Porter et al, 2014; While ensemble modelling has been in common usage by climate modellers for some time, as a simulation method it is relatively new to agricultural production system modelling. However, it is quickly emerging as a useful way for modellers to interact with each other to address emerging issues, such as on climate change through the AgMIP Project Rosenzweig et al, 2013).…”

A review on trade-off analysis of ecosystem services for sustainable land-use management

“…In recent years, the efficiency frontier analysis has been utilized in a variety of researches to examine trade-offs between different ecosystem services, especially in agro-ecosystems (Bekele et al, 2013;Balbi et al, 2015;Mastrangelo and Laterra, 2015). Lester et al (2013) conducted a review on the ecosystem services trade-off analysis framework that based on economic theory, and summarized six common types of ecosystem service interactions based on the insights gained from frontier shapes, including non-interacting services, direct trade-off, convex trade-off, concave trade-off, non-monotonic concave trade-off, and backward S trade-off.…”

The Total Cost of Water-Related Disasters

“…Biophysical-agro-economic models provide comprehensive insights into the feedback effects between human activities and natural resources. When applied to the agricultural system they produce biophysical estimates of crop responses to climate events, with the use of spatially explicit models on different geographical scale (e. g., BALBI et al, 2013;BALBI et al, 2015). The obtained estimates are incorporated into socio-economic models to predict farmers' decisions (or decisions of other human agents, e. g., households), and then to aggregate these decisions at the market level to forecast changes in supply prices (LOGAR and VAN DEN BERGH, 2012).…”