The place of agricultural sciences in the literature on ecosystem services

Abstract

International audienceWe performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific literature on ecosystem services in order to help tracing a research agenda for agricultural sciences. The ecosystem services concept now lies at the heart of current developments to address global environmental change. Do agricultural sciences generate knowledge that covers this emerging theme? An analysis of scientific production allowed us to return to the ecological origins of this concept and see how little it has been appropriated by agricultural sciences until now, despite major focus on the issue of agro-ecosystems in the literature. Agricultural sciences tend to be more active in the field of environmental services, defined as services rendered by humans to ecosystems. The main studied services are those which have already been clearly identified and which act in synergy. Less attention is paid to the antagonisms between different services. These findings call for the implementation of agricultural research programmes that will consider the socio-agro-ecosystem as a whole and broaden the traditional issues addressed by agricultural sciences. We insist on three main management and operational issues that needs to be overcome if this is to be done: working at the landscape scale, increasing inter-disciplinary collaborations and take uncertainties into account

Indicators of agricultural intensity and intensification: a review of the literature

“…We reviewed international studies on AI from the first publications in 1975 until now, and from the international bibliographic database Web of Science (WoS). The papers obtained were analysed using the bibliometric software CorText (Tancoigne et al, 2014). Software CorText is a platform dedicated to the cleaning and treatment of large textual corpuses with the aim of synthesising and analysing big data, whether structured or unstructured (IFRIS, 2014).…”

“…The common procedure is specified as follows: i) calculation of the frequency of occurrence of each term; ii) normalisation of these occurrence and co-occurrence measurements as proximity measurements to link the nodes (Tancoigne et al, 2014). CorText manager recommends choosing direct measures for heterogeneous network like chi-squared test, which only takes into account the raw co-occurrence number between two nodes.…”

A social–ecological approach to managing multiple agro-ecosystem services

“…Many studies have considered the relationship between specific agricultural practices, such as crop rotation or irrigation, and ES. However, most dealt with single services, rather than with bundles of services [10]. The rare exceptions include an examination of tradeoffs between several services in row-crop agriculture, along a gradient of cropping system intensification [11 ].…”

Ecosystem Services as a Boundary Concept: Arguments from Social Ecology

“…With respect to policy and decision-making, these negotiations are not only a scientific exercise but-to some degree-also linked to political or societal interests [34][35][36]. Moreover, due to its nature as a boundary concept, knowledge claims concerning ES from different scientific disciplines are linked to certain fields of policy-making and may potentially conflict with other fields (e.g., conservation biology linked to nature protection conflicts vs. agricultural research which emphasises provisioning services [37,38]). These differences may also cause ambiguities and tensions in the core meaning of the concept, concerning, for example, the strengths and limits of economic valuation methods (including the debate on how to define, quantify, and value ES [10][11][12]) or the need for integrated approaches of monetary and non-monetary valuation methods [39][40][41].…”