Agroforestry vs. conventional : the landscape ecological quality of two different farm management models

Conventional agricultural practices have led to a consistent and widespread landscape over-simplification, agrobiodiversity loss and alien species expansion. Low-intensive and diversified agricultural land use, such as the agroforestry management, can positively help in redirecting these negative trends. To correctly address these issues, and properly monitor the effectiveness of corrective strategies, several result-based monitoring approaches have been developed. Such approaches gain in accuracy and effectiveness, but suffer from cost-efficiency constraints, limiting their broad application. Depending on scale of application, hybrid assessment schemes (partially result-based and practice-based) might be a viable solution. At farm scale, several ecological processes occur under the influence of field scale management and local scale land use configuration, influencing field scale biodiversity. Landscape ecology can help in bridging the gap between practice-based and result-based biodiversity assessments, in that it parallelly addresses structural landscape traits (linked to management options/practices) and its functional ecological traits (linked to results). In our study, we test the use of a toolkit of landscape ecology analyses coupled to floristic-vegetational analyses to compare different farm management models: polyculture agroforestry (Fig. 1) vs. conventional crop management (Fig. 2), gathering our previous experiences on multi-scale studies in the same territorial context (1, 2, 3). Analyses are applied on farms in western Po Plain (Vercelli, Novara and Pavia districts), mainly focused on rice production. Specifically, our study aims at: 1. assessing differences on farm landscape ecological quality (biodiversity-related traits) and floristic-vegetational ecological traits between the two farm management models; 2. testing a farm assessment methodology based on landscape ecology and floristic-vegetational tools to account for the impacts of farm management choices on biodiversity and the related ecosystem services. This methodology constitutes a multi-scale framework for finer scale biodiversity assessments interpretation and is conceived as a low time-demanding and cost-effective complement between landscape and field scale assessments (hybrid assessment schemes).