Ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes

Abstract

There is a tenuous relationship between the world's rural poor, their agriculture, and their surrounding environment. People reliant on farming for their livelihood can no longer focus on current food production without considering the ecosystem processes that ensure long-term production and provide other essential resources required for their well-being. Farmers are now expected to not only produce food, but also steward the landscape to ensure the provisioning of drinking water, wood products for construction and cooking, the availability of animal fodder, the capacity for flood attenuation, the continuity of pollination, and much more. Farmer stewardship of the landscape helps ensure ecological functions that, when beneficial to human well-being, are referred to as ecosystem services. Human activities strongly affect ecosystem services and there is often a resulting trade-off among their availability, which frequently results in the loss of many at the expense of few, most notably when producing food (Foley et al. 2005).