Research of Farming Systems Ecology
Our research aims to provide scientific support for the sustainable development of agroecosystems with special reference to low-input and organic agriculture both in The Netherlands and abroad. Keywords are farming systems design, actors, co-innovation, and landscape ecology.
FSE combines social-ecological knowledge with systems analysis techniques, and a solid understanding of farming realties in the both temperate and tropical regions of the world, for the design of ecologically intensive agroecosystems. New forms of agriculture are urgently needed to be able to secure access to healthy food for 9 billon people in fourth years, with the resources currently available on the planet, while curtailing current environmental degradation. Agroecology can be a source of both solutions and preventive actions for tomorrow’s problems of global agriculture.
Aim
Thus, far from focusing our attention exclusively on research solutions for the organic farming sector, we aim to develop agroecological knowledge able to contribute alternative solutions to the major challenges facing current agriculture, namely:
- global food security;
- provision of ecological services;
- food and environmental health;
- adaptation to climate change, and;
- preservation of the biological and cultural diversity of agricultural landscapes
Approach
Research efforts to support an ecological intensification of world agriculture should integrate processes across scales and disciplines. To understand many of the natural mechanisms that underpin agroecological design, we need to move our scale of analysis from the field plot to the landscape. At the same time we must understand that the role of human agency in agroecosystem design requires shifting from individual decision-making to collective action. We approach agroecology from the perspective of actors, landscapes, and systems design.
Farming systems ecology integrates multiple disciplines through systems approaches to the analysis and design of ecologically intensive agriculture. It builds on the tradition of production ecology from the Wageningen school of thought initiated by Professor C.T. de Wit, and relies on principles of systems ecology for the study of biotic interactions, landscape dynamics and social-ecological feedbacks. Farming systems ecology is at the crossroad of different disciplines, scales, and integration levels. This makes collaboration with other research groups, both at Wageningen and elsewhere, an essential part of our research strategy.
Research themes
We work closely with other research groups so that we can study agroecosystems from different angles and at different scales. Together, we organise our work into four domains. These domains reflect both the level of integration of the agroecosystem we study (from a single field to an entire region) and the type of research question we address (either analytical or design-focused).
Analysis-oriented
The first two domains are analysis-oriented. Here, we aim to understand how agroecosystems function so that we can improve them later:
- Agro-ecosystem properties and functions – where we study how biological, ecological and environmental processes shape the system.
- Social-ecological interactions – where we examine how human decisions, farming practices and ecological dynamics influence one another.
Design-oriented
The other two domains are design-oriented. In these, we use our analytical insights to develop solutions that respond to urgent societal needs:
- Sustainable food baskets – where we explore how to design food systems that provide enough safe, healthy food while remaining environmentally responsible.
- Multifunctional landscapes – where we design landscapes that combine food production with other essential ecosystem services, such as biodiversity, water regulation and climate resilience.
Next to the design of alternative integrated crop-livestock systems, our research embraces the spatially explicit design of alternative landscape configurations and their impact on agroecosystem functioning, spatial dynamics of pest and predators, understanding of collective management of communal resources in rural territories, and the analysis of human-nature interactions in biodiversity rich areas.
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