The Contribution of Forest-Based Ecosystem Services to Agricultural Production
Forest ecosystems are crucial to agricultural production through their direct and indirect contribution of provisioning, regulating and supporting services. These include, but are not exclusive to, pollination services, nutrient cycling, climate regulation, resilience to climate events, soil stabilization and watershed protection. Current initiatives on agricultural intensification appear to overlook the contribution of ecosystem services for crop and livestock productivity.
Although some work has been undertaken on enhancing on-farm provisioning of ecosystems services, the ecological and socio-economic value of forests and trees in terms of their contribution to agricultural production has rarely been integrated into land use planning and other processes.
Past and current work on valuing ecosystem services in general has taken on an economic perspective in placing monetary values on the services provided by nature. Although this is highly informative, it lacks evidence on the direct and indirect contribution of ecosystem services to agricultural productivity.
The purpose of this working group is to review forest and tree-based ecosystem services for their relative contribution to agricultural production with a focus on one or more forest derived services and their links to agriculture. The working group will include an include emphasis on ecosystem services from trees across the landscape, and hence incorporates both forest formations and trees on farms. Based on this critical evidence-base, we will engage with the broader policy/development nexus to bring integrated landscape approaches with a focus both on agricultural production and forest-based ecosystem services.
Current Top Papers from the Working Group
Reed, J., J. Van Vianen, J. Clendinning, G. Petrokovsky & T. Sunderland. 2017. Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Forest Policy and Economics, 84: 62-71.
Ryan, C. M., Pritchard, R., McNicol, I., Owen, M., Fisher, J. A., & Lehmann, C. 2016. Ecosystem services from southern African woodlands and their future under global change. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1703), 20150312.
Wood, S. L., Rhemtulla, J. M., & Coomes, O. T. 2016. Intensification of tropical fallow-based agriculture: trading-off ecosystem services for economic gain in shifting cultivation landscapes? Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 215, 47-56.
González, E., Salvo, A., Defagó, M. T., & Valladares, G. 2016. A moveable feast: insects moving at the forest-crop interface are affected by crop phenology and the amount of forest in the landscape. PLoS One, 11(7), e0158836.
Zewdie, B. A. Tack, B. Ayalew, M. Wondafrash, S. Nemomissa. 2022. Plant biodiversity declines with increasing coffee yield in Ethiopia’s coffee agroforests. Journal of Applied Ecology, 59:1198–1208.
Contact: Terry Sunderland, terry.sunderland@ubc.ca