Agriculture at the landscape level: Scientific background and literature overview

Abstract

Addressing agriculture at the landscape level leads to dealing with agricultural landscapes, defined here as landscapes that contain mainly agricultural land uses. In this chapter, we focus on how agronomy and other disciplines have addressed to date agriculture beyond field and farm management. The landscape agronomy framework suggests that addressing agriculture at the landscape level allows farmers to be included with other stakeholders involved in spatially explicit management of natural resources. This framework also bridges gaps with other disciplines that work to describe and understand agricultural landscapes and their management. In addition to this qualitative summary of the scientific background, we present results of a bibliometric analysis that used the CorTexT platform to explore research keywords, (inter)disciplinary bridges and emerging issues related to these topics. The results highlighted the emergence of climate change, ecosystem services and management practices in the literature related to agronomic terms, especially when landscape is explicitly mentioned in publications' titles, abstracts or keywords. In the end, we draw conclusions about potential improvements to this conceptual framework and introduce the structure of the present book about advances and challenges of a territorial approach to agricultural issues.