About this Research Topic

Background

Agricultural land use is subjected to a variety of pressures today, as demands for food, animal feed and biomass production increase, with an added requirement to simultaneously maintain nature areas, and mitigate climatic and environmental impacts. The biodiversity elements of agricultural systems interact with the abiotic environment to generate a number of ecosystem functions that generate services benefiting humans across scales of time and space. The intensification of agriculture, particularly of that founded on fossil-fuel derived inputs, generally reduces biodiversity and impacts negatively upon a number of regulating and supporting ecosystem services.
To achieve sustainable agricultural systems, we urgently need to advise and apply management regimes that enhance both agricultural production and the provision of multiple ecosystem services. These management regimes need to be optimized for the delivery of ecosystem services under direct but especially indirect effects of climate change. Knowledge of how management practices applied to agricultural systems affect the delivery of multiple ecosystem services still needs to be explored. This holds especially for potential trade-offs between provisioning (i.e. yield), regulating (e.g. nutrient retention, mitigating greenhouse gas emission) and supporting (e.g. soil structural dynamics, water regulation and support of biodiversity habitats) ecosystem services.

In this topic we call for following (all type of articles):

Articles that link management types/practices/regimes (including different types of intensities) to the delivery of single or multiple ecosystem services in agricultural ecosystems;

Articles that link landscape patterns (i.e. how agricultural land is located in the landscape) to the delivery of ecosystem services;

Articles that link climate effects to the delivery of ecosystem services in agricultural ecosystems;

Articles that link biodiversity elements (with a greater focus on soil biodiversity), to ecosystem functions and ecosystem services;

Articles that present ways to link ecosystem services with new tools to determine soil biodiversity (such as metagenomics) and its functions;

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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