At a glance

Primary Partner: BC3 – Basque Centre for Climate Change

Status: Completed, 2014

Models: crop yield, carbon sequestration and storage, water quality, air quality

Highlights: focus on trade-offs for different agri-management strategies

Overview

Although agricultural ecosystems can provide humans with a wide set of benefits, agricultural production system management is mainly driven by food production. As a consequence, a need to ensure food security globally has been accompanied by a significant decline in the state of ecosystems. In order to reduce negative trade-offs and identify potential synergies, it is necessary to improve our understanding of the relationships between various ecosystem services (ES) and the impacts of farm management on ES provision. We developed a spatially explicit application that captures and quantifies ES trade-offs in the crop systems of Llanada Alavesa in the Basque Country. Our analysis presents a quantitative assessment of selected ES including crop yield, water supply and quality, climate regulation, and air quality.

References