Engineering a plant community to deliver multiple ecosystem services.
نویسندگان
چکیده
The sustainable delivery of multiple ecosystem services requires the management of functionally diverse biological communities. In an agricultural context, an emphasis on food production has often led to a loss of biodiversity to the detriment of other ecosystem services such as the maintenance of soil health and pest regulation. In scenarios where multiple species can be grown together, it may be possible to better balance environmental and agronomic services through the targeted selection of companion species. We used the case study of legume-based cover crops to engineer a plant community that delivered the optimal balance of six ecosystem services: early productivity, regrowth following mowing, weed suppression, support of invertebrates, soil fertility building (measured as yield of following crop), and conservation of nutrients in the soil. An experimental species pool of 12 cultivated legume species was screened for a range of functional traits and ecosystem services at five sites across a geographical gradient in the United Kingdom. All possible species combinations were then analyzed, using a process-based model of plant competition, to identify the community that delivered the best balance of services at each site. In our system, low to intermediate levels of species richness (one to four species) that exploited functional contrasts in growth habit and phenology were identified as being optimal. The optimal solution was determined largely by the number of species and functional diversity represented by the starting species pool, emphasizing the importance of the initial selection of species for the screening experiments. The approach of using relationships between functional traits and ecosystem services to design multifunctional biological communities has the potential to inform the design of agricultural systems that better balance agronomic and environmental services and meet the current objective of European agricultural policy to maintain viable food production in the context of the sustainable management of natural resources.
منابع مشابه
Development of Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
Entrepreneurship in the world, especially in Western developed countries, the much interest in recent years the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems and integrating the separation of infrastructure services needed by entrepreneurs and governments innovative citizens, industrialists and entrepreneurs to create. a person apart from the idea of an entrepreneur, long way to run and deliver it to t...
متن کاملEngineering Secure Future Internet Services
In this paper we analyze the need and the opportunity for establishing a discipline for engineering secure Future Internet Services, typically based on research in the areas of software engineering, of service engineering and security engineering. Generic solutions that ignore the characteristics of Future Internet services will fail, yet it seems obvious to build on best practices and results ...
متن کامل“power” Plants
The importance of trees in a challenging urban environment ABSTRACT Our cities are a challenging environment for plants due to urban specific environmental stresses like urban heat island effects altering the radiative regime. Ecosystem service provision by urban trees qualifies the uptake of urban greening as an engineering solution to climate change. Further interdisciplinary research and wid...
متن کاملDevelopment of Entrepreneurship Ecosystem
Entrepreneurship in the world, especially in Western developed countries, the much interest in recent years the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems and integrating the separation of infrastructure services needed by entrepreneurs and governments innovative citizens, industrialists and entrepreneurs to create. a person apart from the idea of an entrepreneur, long way to run and deliver it to t...
متن کاملStrategies to Overcome Network Congestion in Infrastructure Systems
Networked Infrastructure systems deliver services and/or products from point to point along the network. Demand for the services provided by such systems is typically cyclic, creating inefficiencies in capacity utilization. Congestion pricing provides incentives to shift demand from peak time periods to lower demand periods. This effectively increases the capacity of the system without the need...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America
دوره 25 4 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2015