Multifunctional Agriculture: Harnessing Biodiversity for Sustaining Agricultural Production and Ecosystem Services

Informations

Funding country

Sweden

Acronym

SAPES

URL

http://www.cec.lu.se/research/sapes

Start date

1/1/2009

End date

-

Budget

2,707,250 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

SAPES is a research environment combining ecological and socio-economic research. Our goals are to increase the understanding of interactions between farmer’s choices, agricultural land-use, biodiversity and ecosystem services, and to create state-of-the-art decision support tools to aid adaptive governance of agro-ecosystems. Our aim is to understand how land-use and farm management affect farmland biodiversity and thus, ecosystem services. We are also interested to learn more about the factors influencing farmer’s decision making. This information will then be used to generate agri-environment schemes that are better adapted to benefit farmers, biodiversity and ecosystem services. Finally, we will provide decision-makers with support tools that can be used to guide the development towards more applicable and implementable measures and schemes that benefit ecosystem services. SAPES is a collaboration between Lund University, Stockholm University and the Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala. Together we develop a strong research environment working for a sustainable agriculture where biodiversity and ecosystem services are managed as assets to society. SAPES as a strong research environment is financed for the five-year period 2010-2014 by the Swedish Research Council FORMAS and involves about 30 researchers and 20 PhD-students from ecology, agronomy and economy. The research environment SAPES was officially finalized in December 2015, but our research on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agro-ecosystems continues in other projects.