| 1. |
- Brady, Mark V., et al.
(författare)
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Valuing Supporting Soil Ecosystem Services in Agriculture: A Natural Capital Approach
- 2015
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Ingår i: Agronomy Journal. - : Wiley. - 0002-1962 .- 1435-0645. ; 107:5, s. 1809-1821
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Soil biodiversity through its delivery of ecosystem functions and attendant supporting ecosystem services-benefits soil organisms generate for farmers-underpins agricultural production. Yet lack of practical methods to value the long-term effects of current farming practices results, inevitably, in short-sighted management decisions. We present a method for valuing changes in supporting soil ecosystem services and associated soil natural capital-the value of the stock of soil organisms-in agriculture, based on resultant changes in future farm income streams. We assume that a relative change in soil organic C (SOC) concentration is correlated with changes in soil biodiversity and the generation of supporting ecosystem services. To quantify the effects of changes in supporting services on agricultural productivity, we fitted production functions to data from long-term field experiments in Europe and the United States. The different agricultural treatments at each site resulted in significant changes in SOC concentrations with time. Declines in associated services are shown to reduce both maximum yield and fertilizer-use efficiency in the future. The average depreciation of soil natural capital, for a 1% relative reduction in SOC concentration, was 144 (sic) ha(-1) (SD 47 (sic) ha(-1)) when discounting future values to their current value at 3%; the variation was explained by site-specific factors and the current SOC concentration. Moreover, the results show that soil ecosystem services cannot be fully replaced by purchased inputs; they are imperfect substitutes. We anticipate that our results will both encourage and make it possible to include the value of soil natural capital in decisions.
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| 2. |
- de Vries, Franciska T., et al.
(författare)
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Soil food web properties explain ecosystem services across European land use systems
- 2013
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - Washington, DC : Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - 1091-6490 .- 0027-8424. ; 110:35, s. 14296-14301
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Intensive land use reduces the diversity and abundance of many soil biota, with consequences for the processes that they govern and the ecosystem services that these processes underpin. Relationships between soil biota and ecosystem processes have mostly been found in laboratory experiments and rarely are found in the field. Here, we quantified, across four countries of contrasting climatic and soil conditions in Europe, how differences in soil food web composition resulting from land use systems (intensive wheat rotation, extensive rotation, and permanent grassland) influence the functioning of soils and the ecosystem services that they deliver. Intensive wheat rotation consistently reduced the biomass of all components of the soil food web across all countries. Soil food web properties strongly and consistently predicted processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic locations, and they were a better predictor of these processes than land use. Processes of carbon loss increased with soil food web properties that correlated with soil C content, such as earthworm biomass and fungal/bacterial energy channel ratio, and were greatest in permanent grassland. In contrast, processes of N cycling were explained by soil food web properties independent of land use, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and bacterial channel biomass. Our quantification of the contribution of soil organisms to processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic locations shows that soil biota need to be included in C and N cycling models and highlights the need to map and conserve soil biodiversity across the world.
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| 3. |
- Tsiafouli, Maria A., et al.
(författare)
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Intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity across Europe
- 2015
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Ingår i: Global Change Biology. - West Sussex : Wiley. - 1354-1013 .- 1365-2486. ; 21:2, s. 973-985
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Soil biodiversity plays a key role in regulating the processes that underpin the delivery of ecosystem goods and services in terrestrial ecosystems. Agricultural intensification is known to change the diversity of individual groups of soil biota, but less is known about how intensification affects biodiversity of the soil food web as a whole, and whether or not these effects may be generalized across regions. We examined biodiversity in soil food webs from grasslands, extensive, and intensive rotations in four agricultural regions across Europe: in Sweden, the UK, the Czech Republic and Greece. Effects of land-use intensity were quantified based on structure and diversity among functional groups in the soil food web, as well as on community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. We also elucidate land-use intensity effects on diversity of taxonomic units within taxonomic groups of soil fauna. We found that between regions soil food web diversity measures were variable, but that increasing land-use intensity caused highly consistent responses. In particular, land-use intensification reduced the complexity in the soil food webs, as well as the community-weighted mean body mass of soil fauna. In all regions across Europe, species richness of earthworms, Collembolans, and oribatid mites was negatively affected by increased land-use intensity. The taxonomic distinctness, which is a measure of taxonomic relatedness of species in a community that is independent of species richness, was also reduced by land-use intensification. We conclude that intensive agriculture reduces soil biodiversity, making soil food webs less diverse and composed of smaller bodied organisms. Land-use intensification results in fewer functional groups of soil biota with fewer and taxonomically more closely related species. We discuss how these changes in soil biodiversity due to land-use intensification may threaten the functioning of soil in agricultural production systems.
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| 4. |
- van de Kerke, Sara J., et al.
(författare)
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Capturing variation in floral shape : a virtual3D based morphospace for Pelargonium
- 2020
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Ingår i: PeerJ. - : PeerJ. - 2167-8359. ; 8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BackgroundVariation in floral shapes has long fascinated biologists and its modelling enables testing of evolutionary hypotheses. Recent comparative studies that explore floral shape have largely ignored 3D floral shape. We propose quantifying floral shape by using geometric morphometrics on a virtual3D model reconstructed from 2D photographical data and demonstrate its performance in capturing shape variation.MethodsThis approach offers unique benefits to complement established imaging techniques (i) by enabling adequate coverage of the potential morphospace of large and diverse flowering-plant clades; (ii) by circumventing asynchronicity in anthesis of different floral parts; and (iii) by incorporating variation in copy number of floral organs within structures. We demonstrate our approach by analysing 90 florally-diverse species of the Southern African genus Pelargonium (Geraniaceae). We quantify Pelargonium floral shapes using 117 landmarks and show similarities in reconstructed morphospaces for nectar tube, corolla (2D datasets), and a combined virtual3D dataset.ResultsOur results indicate that Pelargonium species differ in floral shape, which can also vary extensively within a species. PCA results of the reconstructed virtual3D floral models are highly congruent with the separate 2D morphospaces, indicating it is an accurate, virtual, representation of floral shape. Through our approach, we find that adding the third dimension to the data is crucial to accurately interpret the manner of, as well as levels of, shape variation in flowers.
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