Print PageAgricultural landscapes can provide multiple ecosystem services, including food, high quality freshwater, opportunities for recreation, and flood control. Yet we often focus narrowly on the production of food, which can unintentionally undermine provision of other key services. The concept of ecosystem services can be an excellent organizing principle for meeting the food needs of a growing global human population for while maintaining resilient provision of other services in agroecosystems because the idea of managing for ecosystem services compels us to consider more than one service and obliges us to consider the interactions and relationships among ecosystem services on the landscape. Thus, a key goal for science in the coming decade is to improve our understanding of how multiple services are provided across agricultural landscapes. What affects the relative proportions of services? Can trade-offs be reduced or synergies strengthened through certain management techniques?
We set out to test the hypothesis that landscape structure, and, in particular, connectivity of non-agricultural patches, is an important determinant of the provision of multiple ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. To do this, we developed, and are empirically testing a modeling framework that quantitatively links landscape connectivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in the the Vallée-du-Richelieu MRC (Municipalité Régionale de Comté), an approximately 750 km2 regional governance body involving 13 towns southeast of Montreal. Using fieldwork and historical analyses, we are investigating the mechanisms behind these linkages to better understand the relationships necessary to build the models.
Results/Conclusions
Initial results indicate that land-use composition alone is not a good indicator of the provision of multiple ecosystem services, and that some services are especially sensitive to landscape configuration. In particular herbivory, nutrients and pollinator diversity are influenced by the size and connectivity of forest patches in the agricultural milieu in our study region. These results corroborate our theoretical expectations that landscape configuration, and connectivity in particular, is important when modeling provision of ecosystem services in agroecological landscapes.
We plan to use this framework to build practical decision-support tools for local communities to use as they grapple with the challenges of environmental management in the face of local, regional, and global change. These models will be linked to stakeholder-developed scenarios of potential futures of the region to help decision-makers objectively quantify the effect of today’s resource and land management decisions on the current and future provision of multiple ecosystem services.
