Assessing the role of different forms of biodiversity in ecosystem services delivery (Axe 2)

In Axe 2, we address the following questions:

(1) How far cropping systems, based on a high level of temporal and spatial plant diversity, promote crop health and production objectives and limit environmental impacts?

(2) In alternative cropping systems, how to manage agro-biodiversity to allow trade-offs between provision of ecosystems services and economic performance?

More specifically, in real agricultural conditions, it is still challenging to demonstrate at field scale the capability of diversity-based farming systems to deliver services without limiting economic performance.

In addition, at a large scale, the relationships between biodiversity and service intensity have been often studied ignoring the role of grown biodiversity in or around the fields, natural regulation being often related to non agricultural part of landscape and not cultivated areas. Moreover, the choice of the cultivated biodiversity to be included in alternative agricultural systems, and its management, will impact their effects on ecosystems service delivery. However, it has received little attention in the literature. Therefore, it is important to reconsider the way to describe and to manage agro-biodiversity to better analyze the impact on ecosystem services and on yield performance.

Finally, in a multifunctional assessment of diversified cropping systems, it is crucial to improve (i) the way to analyze the trade-off or synergy between services and (ii) the choice of variables to measure ecosystems services.

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