Managing Agricultural Landscapes for Ecosystem Services.

Agricultural landscapes support plant, animal and microbial communities that provide humans with a variety of critical ecosystem services. In the past, agricultural scientists have focused almost exclusively on maximizing the provisioning services of agriculture, i.e. increasing the yield of food, feed and fiber. More recently, the critical role of supporting services such as nutrient cycling and soil formation, regulating services including pest suppression and pollination, and cultural services including the recreational and aesthetic qualities of agricultural landscapes have received greater attention. Meeting the challenge of human population growth and the resulting demands on agriculture will require that scientists think deeply about how to maximize the mixture of ecosystem services that agricultural technology and policy can help derive from agricultural landscapes. To be sustainable, future agricultural landscapes will likely need to be explicitly designed and managed to optimize the mix of ecosystem services that each can provide. In this light, the advent of biofuel cropping systems provides an opportunity to rethink and potentially redesign agricultural landscapes. Specifically, the development of cellulosic ethanol production processes that utilize a variety of feedstocks could foster increased diversity in agricultural landscapes and enhance many ecosystem services. For example, in the Midwestern US, native switchgrass and mixed prairie plantings have been proposed as potential cellulosic feedstocks. Data will be presented that suggests that such alternative biofuel feedstocks can increase agricultural landscape diversity with impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services, including pollination, biological pest suppression, water quality, and greenhouse gas mitigation. How societies choose to value the full complement of ecosystem services derived from agriculture will determine the structure of agricultural landscapes globally.