About

Agricultural productivity will become less reliable as climate becomes more variable. Crop rotations are influenced by climate change, but are also affected, by economic demand and ecological effects.

Evidence showed that ecological networks, and the ecosystem services they support, were linked to farmland weed plants and that these were determined by rotations. There were also predictions for how climate change might affect the efficacy of particular crops. What was missing was the mechanistic framework to tie theses effects together (i.e. making the link between climate change and ecosystem services via crop rotations) and the socio-economic understanding.

The PREAR project seeks to develop validated and practical rotational cropping systems that are acceptable to European farmers. Ultimately, the findings should assure stable agro-ecosystem service delivery that is resilient in the face of climate change.

Results

• Crop rotations do affect farmland plants (weeds), and the delivery of the ecosystem service of weed seed predation by carabid beetles.
• Preliminary analyses of a farmer questionnaire, conducted across France, show that farmers are cognisant of climate change and understand some of the implications of such change, think in terms of rotation in their crop management and have begun to modify their rotations and to think of new rotations, especially where variation in climate is already evident.
• Rotations, and their structure, are economically important. Socio-economic modelling approaches are showing that predictions of farmers’ crop choices are significantly improved by including crops as part of a rotation (these should not be considered in isolation). This is particularly evident when crop rotations models are played out in a landscape context. The long-term economic value (and risk) of farming changes with the spatio-temporal structuring of the rotations is not just the sum of the individual crops in the landscape.