AgroBioConnect - Connections in the landscape. Role of landscape complexity in agroecosystem sustainability

An increased demand for food and other agricultural products must take biodiversity and climate change into account.

In this context, new methods for strengthening agrobiodiversity offer an opportunity to combine increased food production with increased sustainability, for example by taking advantage of the landscape´s heterogeneity and connectivity, which can provide more biological diversity and resilient ecosystems.

However, this requires a holistic understanding of the ecological mechanisms operating in agroecosystems at the landscape level as well as how landscape structure affects agroecosystem services.AgroBioConnect aims to investigate the importance of landscape complexity over time and the importance of land use on ecosystem services, both above and below ground, in a range of European agricultural landscapes.

The relationship between the spatial pattern of the landscape and the provision of ecosystem services will be analyzed by linking different scales, including by linking data from satellite remote sensing with biodiversity data collected in the field.The Swedish contribution to AgroBioConnect is to lead a work package whose purpose is to develop and test a new approach and support that enables actors to manage agrobiodiversity and at the above-mentioned scales simultaneously - from soil to landscape level.

Overall, AgroBioConnect will contribute to a better understanding of how the complexity of the landscape affects the provision of ecosystem services.