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Introduction
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Publications
Publications (58)
Regional and national food policies must seek to attain equilibrium among social, economic, political, agricultural , and environmental factors. As a developmental objective, food self-sufficiency (FSS) responds to a region's need for increased autonomy and control over its own food supply. In this systematic review, we employed the Preferred Repor...
The TRAVERSéES project aims to identify trajectories for reducing pesticide use by leveraging various territorial tools. To achieve this, we first conducted an analysis of ecological, economic, social, institutional, and individual factors that influence changes in phytosanitary practices. These insights informed the development of a socio-ecosyste...
Despite the growing societal demands to reduce pesticide use, public policies struggle to reverse the current upward trend. Agroecology emerges as a promising solution, as it promotes ecological regulation and sustainable practices. The systemic nature of the agro-ecological transition requires the development of an interdisciplinary approach. In t...
CONTEXT
As the largest emerging economy globally, China is facing crop-livestock disconnection, which causes unnecessary synthetic fertiliser use, local food and feed unsatisfied demand, and manure nitrogen (N) surplus.
OBJECTIVE
We investigated how crop-livestock regional integration combined with inter-regional transportation of food, feed, and...
According to stakeholders, many European farming systems are close to critical thresholds regarding the challenges they face (e.g., droughts, price declines), functions they deliver (e.g., economic viability, biodiversity and habitat) and attributes required for resilience (e.g., social self-organization). To accelerate a transition process towards...
Context
Managing land use to promote an ecosystem service (ES) without reducing others is challenging. The spatial scale at which no-loss constraints are imposed is relevant.
Objectives
We examined the influence of the spatial scale of no-loss constraints on ESs when one ES was optimised. Specifically, we investigated how carbon sequestration coul...
Finding pathways to enhance the resilience of farming systems (FSs) in Europe is key, given the increasing challenges threatening them. FSs are complex socio-ecological systems in which social and ecological components are strongly linked. Social actors have the capacity to shape the FSs’ resilience, but there is a knowledge gap about how they can...
The provision of ecosystem services (ESs) is driven by land use and biophysical conditions and is thus intrinsically linked to space. Large-scale ES models, developed to inform policy makers on ES drivers, do not usually consider spatial autocorrelation that could be inherent to the distribution of these ESs or to the modeling process. The objectiv...
Diversity in agricultural systems is often presented as having benefits for multiple purposes like food and nutrition security in low- and middle-income countries. Our review aims to give an overview of the strength and direction of the diversity-food security relationship as presented in research published since 2010, based on a comprehensive sear...
What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...
What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...
What exactly is resilience and how can it be enhanced? Farming systems in Europe are rapidly evolving while at the same time being under threat, as seen by the disappearance of dozens of farms every day. Farming systems must become more resilient in response to growing economic, environmental, institutional, and social challenges facing Europe's ag...
Due to the rising incomes and rapid urbanization, China is facing a challenge in producing more meat while avoiding excess manure. These objectives might be in contrast: if excess manure is avoided, meat self-sufficiency might not be met, and meeting meat self-sufficiency might cause severe excess manure. Our study (i) characterizes the eastern reg...
Carbon storage (CS) is essential in mitigating atmospheric CO2 levels, but crop production (CP) contributes to food supply. Land management requires understanding the trade-offs between these important, but conflicting, ecosystem services. We studied land use–based strategies to identify the optimal balance between the two, in particular investigat...
Farming systems in Europe are experiencing multiple stresses and shocks that may push systems beyond critical thresholds after which system change is expected to occur. These critical thresholds may lie in the economic, environmental, social and institutional domain. In this paper we take a participatory approach with involvement of farming system...
CONTEXT
Agriculture in Western Europe is predominantly input-intensive (fertilisers, water, fuel, pesticides) and relies on feed imports. As a result, it is dependent on oil, which may start to decline in production in the 2020s, thus exposing the agricultural sector to potential economic stress, including increased input prices and decreased farme...
The aim of deliverable D3.1 was to make an initial introductory review of research projects and the wider literature on the topic of mixed farming in Europe, to use as a go-to resource for the further work in the MIXED Project and parallel research projects. A literature review covering a large and broad topic such as ‘mixed farming systems’ is cha...
The dominant specialised cropping system (SCS) has supported the increasing population in China, although this agricultural production paradigm could lead to environmental problems. The modern integrated crop-livestock system (ICLS) in China, designed as a recycling paradigm, can alleviate the negative environmental impacts of SCS. However, it must...
Although climate impacts of ruminant agriculture are a major concern worldwide, using policy instruments to force grazing farms out of the livestock industry may diminish opportunities to produce nutritious food without exacerbating the food-feed competition for fertile and accessible land resources. Here, we present a new set of quantitative evide...
Understanding the complex process of generational renewal (GR) in agriculture is essential for supporting the continuation of farming. This paper demonstrates how multiple factors, simultaneously and through their mutual interactions, influence GR and related individual decision-making processes. Results originated from 155 in-depth interviews perf...
Context
Resilience is the ability to deal with shocks and stresses, including the unknown and previously unimaginable, such as the Covid-19 crisis.
Objective
This paper assesses (i) how different farming systems were exposed to the crisis, (ii) which resilience capacities were revealed and (iii) how resilience was enabled or constrained by the far...
Achieving food and feed self-sufficiency is important for both China and the world. While China's food self-sufficiency has been examined at the national and provincial levels, few studies consider lower administrative levels or different food and feed items. This study quantifies self-sufficiency in the eastern regions of China and examines correl...
The resilience of EU farming systems is perceived to be low to moderate. Many farming systems are perceived to be close to critical thresholds, with low economic viability leading to farmer exits, making it hard to maintain the social fabric, natural resources and biodiversity. There are limits to success with regard to increasing farm size and int...
An increasing variety of stresses and shocks provides challenges and opportunities for EU farming systems. This article presents findings of a participatory assessment on the sustainability and resilience of eleven EU farming systems, to inform the design of adequate and relevant strategies and policies. According to stakeholders that participated...
en Sufficient generational renewal is an important contributor to resilient farming systems but across the EU there is widespread concern over the so‐called ‘young farmer problem’. This article recommends several policy areas to support generational renewal. The first need is to clearly define the exact generational renewal challenge, since availab...
The sustainability and resilience of EU farming systems are threatened. According to stakeholders in selected EU farming systems, many of these systems are close to critical thresholds regarding the challenges they face (e.g., droughts, price declines), functions they deliver (e.g., economic viability, biodiversity and habitat) and attributes requi...
For improving the sustainability and resilience of EU farming systems, it is important to assess their likely responses to future challenges under future scenarios. We evaluated future resilience in 11 case studies across the EU, using a soft coupling of different qualitative and quantitative approaches.
Results from the qualitative approach "FoP...
Pest control is still a major issue for the agricultural sector. Conservation biological control, which controls pests using their natural enemies (NE), appears to be a promising strategy considering the negative impacts of pesticides on the environment and human health. Conservation biological control relies on two main processes: the conservation...
For improving sustainability and resilience of EU farming system, the current state needs to be assessed, before being able to move on to future scenarios. Assessing sustainability and resilience of farming systems is a multi-faceted research challenge in terms of the scientific domains and scales of integration (farm, household, farming system lev...
Agricultural systems in Europe face accumulating economic, ecological and societal challenges, raising concerns about their resilience to shocks and stresses. These resilience issues need to be addressed with a focus on the regional context in which farming systems operate because farms, farmers' organizations, service suppliers and supply chain ac...
This report presents the results of a participatory sustainability and resilience assessment of 11 farming systems in the European Union (EU). The assessment focussed on system functions, applied strategies and resilience attributes. Overall, workshop results revealed a high allocated importance to the functions related to food production and econo...
Wetlands should not be considered as independent objects but as dynamically connected objects, collectively known as wetlandscapes. We developed a framework that analyzes the influences of wetland suitability and connectivity on amphibian distributions. We defined two indices: a Wetland Suitability Index describing wetland quality and a Movement Pe...
Wetlands have been degraded and destroyed, resulting in the decline of many wetland-dependent species populations. Many conservation efforts are based on protection of individual wetlands; however, fluxes of energy, materials and organisms between wetlands create important structural and functional connections upon which several species depend. We...
Repeated fires could prevent tree encroachment in the grass stratum of savannas. However, there are some ecological mechanisms that allow invasion of trees in moist grasslands and eventually, when trees reach high density, prevent fire spread. To better understand the interplay between fire and tree encroachment, we developed a spatially explicit i...
Assessing the carrying capacity is of primary importance in arid rangelands. This becomes even more important during droughts, when rangelands exhibit non-equilibrium dynamics, and the dynamics of livestock conditions and forage resource are decoupled. Carrying capacity is usually conceived as an equilibrium concept, that is, the consumer density t...
For over a century, governments on both sides of the Canada–US border have employed diverse policy instruments and management
tools to protect the Great Lakes. This crucial freshwater resource continues to show signs of degradation. We explore how
the International Organization for Standardization Risk Management Standard (ISO 31000) can be used by...
Water and forests are inextricably linked. Pressures on forests from population growth and climate change are increasing risks to forests and their aquatic ecosystem services (AES). There is a need to incorporate AES in forest management but there is considerable uncertainty about how to do so. Approaches that manage forest ecosystem services such...
We compared two basic assumptions about the woody cover distribution in tropical and subtropical areas: the equilibrium (woody cover always reaches a long-term steady state) vs the non-equilibrium assumption (woody cover fluctuates in response to fire disturbances). We considered two models each one representative of one of the two assumptions: an...
Rangelands provide the main forage resource for livestock in many parts of the world, but maintaining long-term productivity and providing sufficient income for the rancher remains a challenge. One key issue is to maintain the rangeland in conditions where the rancher has the greatest possibility to adapt his/her management choices to a highly fluc...
Moist savannas and tropical forests share the same climatic conditions and occur side by side. Experimental evidences show that the tree cover of these ecosystems exhibits a bimodal frequency distribution. This is considered as a proof of savanna-forest bistability, predicted by dynamic vegetation models based on non-linear differential equations....
Rainfall seasonality and vegetation–fire feedbacks characterize humid savannas and tropical forests dynamics. In these ecosystems fire occurrence is influenced by the amount of grass, and trees respond to fire differently according to their height. Here we present a spatially implicit matrix model of humid savanna–forest dynamics. The state variabl...
The tree-grass co-existence in savannas involves multiple and sometimes connected biogeophysical conditions. The savanna domain, its boundaries, and transitions (gradual or abrupt) to other vegetation types (i.e., grassland or forest) are fundamental for the management of ecosystems and for preserving the biodiversity in present conditions and in f...
The mechanisms permitting the co-existence of tree and grass in savannas have been a source of contention for many years. The two main classes of explanations involve either competition for resources, or differential sensitivity to disturbances. Published models focus principally on one or the other of these mechanisms. Here we introduce a simple e...
