Abstract
Agricultural production is expected to continue to expand globally, despite substantial trade-offs with other ecosystem services. This has led to an increasing interest in managing agricultural landscapes for enhanced multi-functionality . The aim of this project is to develop a conceptual framework and new empirical methods for ‘rapid and systematic assessments’ of connections among multiple ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. The core hypothesis is that different services are interlinked or ‘bundled’ together, and therefore co-vary as one service (in this case e.g. food or bio-fuels) increases. We also want to investigate if there are distinct bundles that change with altered land uses, spatial scales and management practices, and if so, whether this change is smooth, or abrupt and non-linear. We will focus on two agricultural landscapes, one in Sweden and one in South Africa, where we have substantial previous field experience and are well connected to researchers, actors and policy makers. Both landscapes contain large-scale commercial farming, small-scale farming, and a national park/nature reserve. Using case studies from two widely different landscapes will help ensure a generality of the conceptual framework and methodology development. Methods include expert interviews using participatory techniques of ranking and judgments, synthesizing existing data in databases, statistical analyses of ‘bundle indexes’, and cross-scale analyses using GIS imagery.
Sweden