Olivier Therond

French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) | INRAE · Department of Environment and Agronomy

L’agriculture et l’alimentation doivent relever de nombreux défis environnementaux et sanitaires. Le développement de scénarios prospectifs est une approche pour concevoir et évaluer des stratégies y répondant. Nous comparons ici sept scénarios ayant en commun l’objectif de neutralité carbone en 2050. Ces scénarios diffèrent cependant pour l’utilis...

Agricultural soils provide multiple ecosystem services (ES) that can replace chemical inputs to support agricultural production. However, most arable cropping systems are managed with little concern for preserving ecological functions, which could reduce their ability to provide these ES. An increasing number of studies assess ES from agroecosystem...

The estimation of irrigation water requirements (IWR) amount and timing is crucial for designing water management strategies at the regional scale. Irrigation requirements can be estimated with different types of models: very complex and detailed crop models, agent-based models, or simplified modeling approaches. Because simplified approaches are o...

Following the Paris agreement in 2015, the European Union (EU) set a carbon neutrality objective by 2050, and so did France. The French agricultural sector can contribute as a carbon sink through carbon storage in biomass and soil, in addition to reducing GHG emissions. The objective of this study is to quantitatively assess the additional storage...

Cover crops have multiple benefits, such as improving water quality, providing a green manure effect, and storing carbon in the soil. They can, however, reduce drainage significantly during key periods of hydrosystem recharge, especially in winter. The objective of this study was to evaluate the influence of cover crops and/or crop diversification...

The expanded use of water-intensive crops, such as maize, has exacerbated soil drying and water scarcity in watersheds with large irrigated surfaces. As we face climbing drought risks, water can be conserved in such areas by adopting agricultural systems that limit water deficits at the watershed level. In this study, integrated modeling was used t...

Recycling organic waste in agriculture is an important component of strategies that address global and local challenges, such as soil carbon storage and fertility. However, using organic waste as fertilizer can also induce unintended pollution. These combined impacts can be understood through the perspective of a social-ecological system and studie...

This chapter addresses collection and integration of large amounts of data from a variety of sources when developing agronomic approaches at the landscape and territory levels. Data commonly used in agro-environmental studies are climate, soils, land cover and land use (including cropping practices). They are used as inputs for indicator- or model-...

Face aux nombreux défis sociétaux à relever (environnement, sécurité alimentaire, santé), différentes formes d’agriculture sont envisagées. Agriculture biologique, agriculture de conservation des sols et maintenant agriculture régénératrice sont trois récits fondateurs se référant à l’agroécologie. Toutefois, l’agriculture régénératrice, nouvelle a...

Agriculture’s primary function is the production of food, feed, fibre and fuel for the fast-growing world population. However, it also affects human health and ecosystem integrity. Policymakers make policies in order to avoid harmful impacts. How to assess such policies is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to help evalua...

The sanitary situation of sugar beet crops is currently critical in France and in Europe, due to outbreaks of green peach aphids Myzus persicae, vectors of beet yellows, while the imidacloprid-based solution (neonicotinoid) is no longer authorized. In addition to alternative management methods to insecticides use at the plot level, a potentially ef...

Maintaining or increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks is crucial to meet the 2050 carbon neutrality target. The contribution of crop and grassland to SOC stocks was shown to be variable in France according to the soil, climate, and management situations. To assist farmers assessing how their land use and management modifies SOC stocks, a user-...

(1) Although most past studies are based on static analyses of the pest regulation drivers, evidence shows that a greater focus on the temporal dynamics of these interactions is urgently required to develop more efficient strategies. (2) Focusing on aphids, we systematically reviewed (i) empirical knowledge on the drivers influencing the dynamics o...

Increasing the levels of ecosystem services that contribute to agricultural production (ES) is a challenge for the sustainability of agricultural systems. Agricultural advisors lack low-data operational approaches for assessing ES and knowledge to support development of ES-based systems. To fill this gap, we developed an approach that assesses rela...

Predicting the effects of crop management and landscape structure on biological pest control is a key challenge for implementing innovative pest management systems. Here, we compare the performances of two machine-learning methods (regression trees and random forests) with those of linear models in predicting cereal aphid abundance, parasitism, and...

CONTEXT New types of farming systems have emerged in response to societal demands to reduce environmental impacts and dependence on non-renewable resources. These agriculture models can be classified according to their relative use of anthropic inputs or biodiversity and associated ecosystem services as agricultural production factors. All these m...

Given the negative environmental effects of conventional agricultural techniques, the need for biodiversity-friendly agriculture systems that rely more on ecosystem services and less on chemical inputs is becoming increasingly urgent. In this paper, we focus on crop protection strategies that are alternatives to the use of pesticides. Diversificati...

Promoting pest biological control within agrosystems is a way to reduce the use of pesticides. The lack of quantification tools of this ecosystem service is a major obstacle to the changes in crop protection strategies. ARENA's ambition was to build methods to observe natural pest control directly on fields, provide tools to quantify and predict na...

Conservation biological control (CBC) has been an active research topic for the last two decades and is now one of the key ways being explored to develop agroecological production systems. Using broad concepts and indicators, recent reviews and meta‐analyses have highlighted major inconsistencies in the responses of CBC to landscape structure, reve...

L’initiative « 4 pour 1 000 : les sols pour la sécurité alimentaire et le climat » propose d’augmenter chaque année d’un quatre millième le stock de carbone présent dans tous les sols du monde. À la demande de l’Ademe et du ministère de l’Agriculture et de l’Alimentation, l’Inra (devenu aujourd’hui INRAE) a conduit une étude, centrée sur la France...

Cropping system models are widely used tools for simulating the growth and development of crops at field scale. However, it is often difficult to satisfy their detailed input and output data requirements for a proper evaluation of model. In this study, expert knowledge data were used as alternative source to fulfil these data requirements. The mode...

Plusieurs formes d’agriculture ont récemment émergé pour faire face aux externalités négatives de l'agriculture. Certaines visent à réduire les impacts. D'autres comme l'agroécologie propose de fonder l’agriculture sur les services écosystémiques. De ce fait, il coexiste actuellement deux grilles d'évaluation mal articulées caractérisant, l'une les...

The general purpose of the primary and secondary data available in this article is to support an integrated assessment of scenarios of crop-livestock integration at the territorial level i.e. of exchanges between arable and livestock farms. The data is a result of a research collaboration between the scientist from INRAE, agricultural advisers from...

We believe that approaches to landscape modification should explicitly include farmers, given their understanding of landscape management practices, and consider climate change, so that the landscapes are designed for future environmental conditions. Climate change is an existential threat to farmers and current patterns of arable agriculture, lead...

CONTEXT Crop diversification is now well-recognised as a strong lever to address the environmental challenges currently faced by agriculture. Connecting and fostering local exchanges between specialised arable crop and livestock farms can support the diversification of crops and relocate animal feeding with local protein (vs. soya supplements). How...

Many studies have assessed the potential of agricultural practices to sequester carbon (C). A comprehensive evaluation of impacts of agricultural practices requires not only considering C storage but also direct and indirect emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and their side effects (e.g. on the water cycle or agricultural production). We used a hi...

Many studies have assessed the potential of agricultural practices to sequester carbon (C). A comprehensive evaluation of impacts of agricultural practices requires not only considering C storage but also direct and indirect emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) and their side effects (e.g., on the water cycle or agricultural production). We used a h...

https://www.inrae.fr/actualites/stocker-4-1000-carbone-sols-potentiel-france

--- 50 days' free access : https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1cHkg3QCo9YqNH ---- Vulnerability, resilience, robustness and adaptive capacity are four key concepts that characterize dynamics of systems when disturbance occurs. However, rendering them operational for agricultural systems using an approach to quantify dynamics remains a challenge. To p...

Analysis of trade-offs and synergies between ecosystem services (ES) and their underlying drivers is a main issue in ES research. The analysis is complex and requires innovative analytical approaches. To address this complexity, we used an original approach that combines a multivariate regression tree (MRT), data analysis, and spatial mapping. We a...

In a changing world, identifying the drivers of vulnerability, resilience and robustness (VRR) of agricultural systems has become a major issue. We developed and applied a generic analytical framework to perform a systematic review of studies that quantitatively assess VRR of agricultural systems in temperate climate zones. After a thorough selecti...

The scientific literature contains many studies of trade-offs or synergies between ecosystem services (ES); however, it is challenging to qualify and compare these studies. To address this issue, we developed a structured generic methodological classification (typology) of studies that focuses on relationships between ES. The method focuses on char...

Notre système alimentaire n’est ni sain ni durable : l’agriculture et l’alimentation sont au cœur des enjeux environnementaux (dérèglement climatique, effondrement de la biodiversité) et de santé (développement des maladies chroniques). De nouveaux modèles d’agriculture cherchent à prendre en compte ces enjeux en développant des pratiques pour amél...

Evaluating and improving cropping systems is essential to reduce nitrate leaching, improve drinking water quality and prevent eutrophication. Since the intensity of nitrogen (N) leaching varies greatly spatially and is difficult to measure, crop models are useful tools to quantify the influence of climate, soil and agricultural practices on N leach...

Grasslands offer many environmental and economic advantages that put them at the heart of future sustainable ruminant production systems. This study aimed to quantify and map the dry matter yield (DMY) and nitrogen yield (NY) of French grasslands resulting from cutting and grazing practices, based on the existing diversity of grassland vegetation,...

Natural, semi-natural, and temporary grasslands harbour tremendous plant diversity. In this study, we identified various functional categories of plants to better characterise their levels of forage production and ecosystem services. The categories were defined based on species' growth rates (fast or slow) and timing (growth concentrated in the spr...

Ecosystem services (ES) provided to farmers are now well-considered as natural-capital-based production factors. Developing them is a way to reduce use of anthropic inputs and so to develop a more sustainable agriculture. However, it is still a scientific challenge to evaluate quantitatively part of ES relatively of anthropic inputs in agricultural...

Livestock farming is criticized for negatively impacting the environment, concerns about animal welfare and the impact of excessive meat consumption on human health. However, livestock farming provides other underappreciated and poorly communicated benefits to society in terms of employment, product quality, cultural landscapes and carbon storage b...

http://institut.inra.fr/Missions/Eclairer-les-decisions/Etudes/Toutes-les-actualites/Stocker-4-pour-1000-de-carbone-dans-les-sols-francais

The bioeconomy is expected to be a key solution to supply societies with food and non-food products while replacing non-renewable resources and preserving natural ones. Sustainability of bioeconomy systems is currently an issue that has to be addressed. Current research dealing with the bioeconomy focuses primarily on technologies to improve biomas...

The development of agricultural systems based on ecosystem services (ES) requires adaptive management of biodiversity at the plot and landscape scales. In this paper, we provide an overview of knowledge on the relationship between biodiversity and this SE. For this, we rely mainly on the results of the EFESE-Agricultural Ecosystems study, coordinat...

The success of Integrated Assessment and Modeling of social-ecological systems (SESs) requires a framework allowing members of this process to share, organize and integrate their knowledge about the system under consideration. To meet this need and ease management of successful modeling processes, we present a conceptual framework for integrated ag...

Faire face aux crises environnementale et alimentaire nécessite d'analyser les interdépendances entre agriculture, environnement et alimentation. Nous avons montré précédemment que le concept de santé permet de fédérer un ensemble de domaines disciplinaires s'intéressant aux écosystèmes à différentes échelles et aux hommes (voir Regard O6). Sur cet...

Land managers need spatially explicit information about agricultural practices to address issues that arise from the use of natural resources in agriculture. One main characteristic of agriculture is its great variability in space and time. However, describing the spatial distribution of "cropping systems", i.e. crop sequences and crop management s...

For farmers, the transition towards agroecology implies redesigning both their production system and their commercialisation system. To engage in this type of transition, they need to develop new knowledge on practices adapted to local conditions, which will involve new actors in their network. This chapter explores the role of actors’ networks in...

Présentation soutenance d'HDR - Olivier Therond

The purpose of the TATA-BOX project was to develop a toolbox to support local stakeholders in the design of an agroecological transition at local level. A participatory process based on existing conceptual and methodological frameworks was developed for the design of new configurations of stakeholders and resource systems in the farming systems, su...

Analyses of transition towards a more sustainable agriculture often identify two different pathways that can be linked to either strong or weak sustainability. In this interdisciplinary work, we aim at overcoming this narrow choice between these two alternatives, by offering a socio-agronomic characterisation of multiple agriculture models that cur...

In this chapter we present very briefly the main framework used to establish the TATA-BOX project and the general methodology developed to codesign the territorial agroecological transition.

The purpose of the TATA-BOX project was to develop a toolbox to sup-port local stakeholders in the design of an agroecological transition at local level. A participatory process based on existing conceptual and methodological frameworks was developed for the design of new configurations of stakeholders and resource systems in the farming systems, s...

Analyses of transition towards a more sustainable agriculture often identify two different pathways that can be linked to either strong or weak sustainability. In this interdisciplinary work, we aim at overcoming this narrow choice between these two alternatives, by offering a socio-agronomic characterisation of multiple agriculture models that cur...

For farmers, the transition towards agroecology implies redesigning both their production system and their commercialisation system. To engage in this type of transition, they need to develop new knowledge on practices adapted to local conditions, which will involve new actors in their network. This chapter explores the role of actors’ networks in...

In this chapter we present very briefly the main framework used to establish the TATA-BOX project and the general methodology developed to codesign the territorial agroecological transition.

Grassland functional diversity and management for enhancing ecosystem services and reducing environmental impacts: A cross-scale analysis

L'évaluation multicritère des systèmes agricoles : une révolution des méthodes

The success of Integrated Assessment and Modeling of social-ecological systems (SESs) requires a framework allowing members of this process to share, organize and integrate their knowledge about the system under consideration. To meet this need and ease management of successful modeling processes, we present a conceptual framework for integrated ag...

There is wide agreement on the need to change the prevalent agricultural models, given their negative impacts and their incompatibility with current societal issues. Agroecological transition has been promoted as a potential solution to the ecological, social and economic problems generated by these models. It however involves a systemic, multi-sca...

L’Agroécologie a apporté à l’agronomie les approches systémiques, multi-échelles et multi-acteurs. Ces nouvelles dimensions impliquent l’emploi de méthodes participatives. Le projet TATA-BOX a développé une démarche de design participative et une boîte à outils dédiées à la transition agroécologique. La démarche était structurée en trois ateliers p...