Managing biotic interactions for ecological intensification of agroecosystems

Abstract

Agriculture faces the challenge of increasing food production while simultaneously reducing the use of inputs and delivering other ecosystem services. Ecological intensification of agriculture is a paradigm shift, which has recently been proposed to meet such challenges through the manipulation of biotic interactions. While this approach opens up new possibilities, there are many constraints related to the complexity of agroecosystems that make it difficult to implement. Future advances, which are essential to guide agricultural policy, require an eco-evolutionary framework to ensure that ecological intensification is beneficial in the long term.

How to implement biodiversity-based agriculture to enhance ecosystem services: a review

“…Management strategies aiming to increase provision of input services raise or exacerbate two knowledge issues that science can help address: (i) how to characterize functional biodiversity for sets of organisms (Brussaard et al 2010;Moonen and Ba 2008), and (ii) how to model interactions among environmental perturbations (including farmers' management practices), functional biodiversity, and ecosystem services (Cardinale et al 2012;Gaba et al 2014). We identify two main research domains that deal with these two issues: functional ecology and landscape ecology.…”

Multiple cropping systems as drivers for providing multiple ecosystem services: from concepts to design

“…Significant changes in practices and policies are needed to support this shift from farming practices aiming to deliver a single provisioning service to practices that deliver a range of services (Robertson and Swinton 2005). One suggestion is to increase the complexity of agroecosystems by increasing cultivated biodiversity (Altieri and Rosset 1995), assuming that biotic interactions could provide the functions required by the systems to enhance soil fertility without external inputs and protect crops against pests and weeds while ensuring adequate crop productivity (Doré et al 2011;Ekström and Ekbom 2011;Bommarco et al 2013;Gaba et al 2014).…”

“…Similarly, the benefits of a temporal succession of species will depend on how the species affect each other and on how the agroecosystem functions. The effect of biodiversity on agroecosystem functioning may not be immediate and can often be observed in the response of species to predation, competition, or parasitism (see Gaba et al 2014 for further details).…”

Reconciling Environment and Production in Managed Ecosystems: Is Ecological Intensification a Solution?

“…It can thus be related to all practices that consist in intensifying the use of natural functions provided by ecosystems to support production (Chevassus au Louis and Griffon 2008). By nature, EI is closely related to biodiversity, which can directly or indirectly support production and other ESs through functional processes (Bommarco et al 2013;Gaba et al 2014). Although to date it has for the most part been mentioned in discussions on crop systems in agriculture, with some adjustments it can be generalized to other managed ecosystems dedicated to production (Rey et al 2015).…”

“…In agriculture, several approaches such as nature mimicry, mixed cropping, diversified crop rotations, and cover crops, and increasing the quantity of semi-natural habitats in the landscape (Bommarco et al 2013;Tittonell 2014) are considered to maintain productivity while decreasing the use of anthropogenic inputs. Despite this progress, there are still major knowledge gaps that deserve to be investigated in order to assess whether EI can be considered an efficient and practical concept for managed ecosystems (Gaba et al 2014;Caron et al 2014). First, the impact of some current and past practices on ecosystem functioning, key ecological components, and their interactions at different spatial scales deserves further investigation (Hole et al 2005;Bouget et al 2012;Lamers et al 2013).…”