Project
Agroecological landscapes
The conservation and restoration of biodiversity in the agricultural landscape is an important theme in the MMIP(BO/TKI). Nature-inclusive agriculture and circular agriculture are farming approaches where agroecological principles are applied to a higher degree than in conventional agriculture in order to maintain and improve soil quality and biodiversity as well as providing ecosystem services such as water purification, pollination and biological pest suppression.
Previous experience shows that such nature-based solutions and measures can have limited effectiveness in enhancing biodiversity and providing biological pest- and disease suppression and other ecosystem services when they are applied at isolated locations and where measures are lacking on the level of the landscape. There is scattered scientific knowledge available on the degree to which landscape characteristics are associated with high biodiversity and pest and disease suppression and other ecosystem services. Despite this, to the best of our knowledge, a framework that bundles and translates this knowledge for use to evaluate and improve/re-design landscapes, that includes the farm-level considerations, is currently lacking. Added to this, the required landscape characteristics are difficult to realize following the multiple and varying interests of different land-uses, land-owners and many stakeholders.
In this project we aim to develop a framework for evaluating the agroecological performance of a landscape and to determine the social, economic and political boundary conditions that are required to improve the landscape performance. We will bundle available knowledge on the agroecological performance of landscapes and analyse how three divergent landscapes are currently performing and identify the social, economic and political barriers for improving their performance and describe how these barriers can be overcome. This will be put into a framework for application in practice. We will stimulate application of the framework in practice by communicating and/or co-developing it with relevant researchers as well as the stakeholders and provincial government of the studied landscapes.