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Integrating ecosystem services with geodesign to create multifunctional agricultural landscapes: A case study of a New Zealand hill country farm

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posted on 2023-07-10, 01:55 authored by Duy TranDuy Tran, Diane Pearson, Alan Palmer, Estelle DominatiEstelle Dominati, David Gray, John LowryJohn Lowry

An ecosystem-based management approach (EBM) is suggested as one solution to help to tackle environmental challenges facing worldwide farming systems whilst ensuring socio-economic demands are met. Despite its usefulness, the application of this approach at the farm-scale presents several implementation problems, including the difficulty of (a) incorporating the concept of ecosystem services (ES) into agricultural land use decision-making and (b) involving the farmer in the planning process. This study aims to propose a solution to overcome these challenges by utilising a geodesign framework and EBM approach to plan and design a sustainable multifunctional agricultural landscape at the farm scale. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to plan and design multifunctional agricultural landscapes that offer improved sustainability, using a New Zealand hill country farm as a case study. A geodesign framework is employed to generate future land use and management scenarios for the study area, visualize changes, and assess the impacts of future land use on landscape multifunctionality and the provision of associated ES and economic outcomes. In this framework, collaboration with the farmer was carried out to obtain farm information and co-design the farmed landscapes. The results from our study demonstrate that farmed landscapes where multiple land use/ land cover types co-exist can provide a wide range of ES and therefore, meet both economic and environmental demands. The assessment of impacts for different land use change scenarios demonstrates that land use change towards increasing landscape diversity and complexity is a key to achieving more sustainable multifunctional farmed landscapes. The integration of EBM and geodesign, is a transdisciplinary approach that can help farmers target land use and management decisions by considering the major ES that are, and could be, provided by the landscapes in which these farm systems are situated, therefore maximising the potential for beneficial outcomes.

NZBIDA

Funding

MBIE SSIF New Zealand Bioeconomy in the Digital Age (NZBIDA)

History

Rights statement

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/).

Publication date

2022-12-05

Project number

  • PRJ0281114

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Publisher

Elsevier

Journal title

Ecological Indicators

ISSN

1470-160X

Volume/issue number

146

Page numbers

109762

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