A network approach for managing ecosystem services and improving food and nutrition security on smallholder farms

Abstract

Smallholder farmers are some of the poorest and most food insecure people on Earth. Their high nutritional and economic reliance on home‐grown produce makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors such as pollinator loss or climate change which threaten agricultural productivity. Improving smallholder agriculture in a way that is environmentally sustainable and resilient to climate change is a key challenge of the 21st century. Ecological intensification, whereby ecosystem services are managed to increase agricultural productivity, is a promising solution for smallholders. However, smallholder farms are complex socio‐ecological systems with a range of social, ecological and environmental factors interacting to influence ecosystem service provisioning. To truly understand the functioning of a smallholder farm and identify the most effective management options to support household food and nutrition security, a holistic, systems‐based understanding is required. In this paper, we propose a network approach to understand, visualise and model the complex interactions occurring among wild species, crops and people on smallholder farms. Specifically, we demonstrate how networks may be used to (a) identify wild species with a key role in supporting, delivering or increasing the resilience of an ecosystem service; (b) quantify the value of an ecosystem service in a way that is relevant to the food and nutrition security of smallholders; and (c) understand the social interactions that influence the management of shared ecosystem services. Using a case study based on data from rural Nepal, we demonstrate how this framework can be used to connect wild plants, pollinators and crops to key nutrients consumed by humans. This allows us to quantify the nutritional value of an ecosystem service and identify the wild plants and pollinators involved in its provision, as well as providing a framework to predict the effects of environmental change on human nutrition. Our framework identifies mechanistic links between ecosystem services and the nutrients consumed by smallholder farmers and highlights social factors that may influence the management of these services. Applying this framework to smallholder farms in a range of socio‐ecological contexts may provide new, sustainable and equitable solutions to smallholder food and nutrition security. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Linking network ecology and ecosystem services to benefit people

“…Interdisciplinary approaches to ecosystem service science have generally been tackled from a broad socio-ecological perspective, with many ecosystem service studies integrating both biophysical characterisations and forms of sociocultural or economic valuations (Chan & Satterfield, 2020). There has been a growing body of work taking such interdisciplinary approaches and introducing frameworks for employing ecological, social and socio-ecological interaction network approaches in ecosystem service assessment (Bohan et al, 2013;Dee et al, 2017;Felipe-Lucia et al, 2020, 2022Gonzalez et al, 2017;Hines et al, 2015;Keyes et al, 2021;Marini et al, 2019;Samways et al, 2010;Timberlake et al, 2022;Tixier et al, 2013;Van Kleunen et al, 2023;Windsor et al, 2022;Xiao et al, 2018;Table S1). For instance, Windsor et al (2022) Ecosystem service flow: The provision of an ecosystem service through a system via stages from natural capital (e.g.…”

The Household Context of In Situ Conservation in a Center of Crop Diversity: Self-Reported Practices and Perceptions of Maize and Phaseolus Bean Farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico

“…The transformation of small farmers into labor for state or private capital has been a global development goal for decades, e.g., [3,55]. More recently, recognition of the diversity conservation "service" provided by these farms has led to their endorsement by some development and conservation professionals [56,57]. However, the reality is that the poverty, physical hardship, social neglect, and cultural marginalization experienced by many agricultural households and communities create strong pressures to find alternatives to farming, particularly among youth.…”

Hub‐and‐spoke social networks among Indonesian cocoa farmers homogenise farming practices

“…Around 2.5 billion people work on smallholder farms providing 80% of the food consumed in much of the developing world (Walpole et al., 2013). However, to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of ending poverty and hunger by 2030 and restore degraded local natural environments, substantial changes are urgently needed in the practices of smallholder farmers (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017; MacLeod et al., 2022; Shennan‐Farpón et al., 2022; Timberlake et al., 2022). Indonesia is the fifth largest producer of cocoa with most of cocoa grown by smallholder farmers concentrated on the island of Sulawesi (Effendy et al., 2019).…”

“…Smallholder farms form complex social‐ecological systems (Timberlake et al., 2022) and smallholder farmers' choices of agricultural practices can trigger huge implications for their food security as well as their well‐being (Vicol et al., 2018). Policy makers and development program managers routinely promote tested practices among smallholder farmers to foster food security, biodiversity, soil health and water resource protection (Asare‐Nuamah et al., 2019; Baiyegunhi et al., 2019; Cafer & Rikoon, 2018; Zhang et al., 2021).…”