Ecosystem services along a management gradient in Michigan (USA) cropping systems
Introduction
Understanding interactions among the services provided by agricultural systems requires understanding patterns and the individual trade-offs that occur when the delivery of one service is affected by the delivery of another. While it may be straightforward to assess trade-offs between two ecosystem services, it is more difficult to evaluate trade-offs among multiple services (Foley et al., 2005, Power, 2010). Trade-off curves (Antle and Valdivia, 2006, Stoorvogel et al., 2004) describe relationships between pairs of sustainability indicators.
Here we examine tradeoffs among several important ecosystem services in row crop agriculture in order to provide better knowledge for policy and farm level decision making. We use eight indicators to indicate the strength of ecosystem service delivery in our comparative ecosystems. Among them are (1) grain yield, to indicate the delivery of food and economic benefits; (2) drainage to indicate the delivery of regulating services related to flood control, groundwater discharge, and erosion avoidance; (3) global warming impact to indicate the delivery of climate mitigation services; (4) plant diversity to indicate the delivery of biological control, arthropod habitat, and other conservation benefits; (5) soil carbon to indicate services related to soil fertility, soil microbe and invertebrate habitat, filtration, and soil structure; (6) soil water content to indicate services related to soil water availability; (7) nitrate leaching to indicate services related to nitrogen conservation, nutrient mobility, and water quality in general; and (8) aboveground net primary productivity, as a supporting service, to indicate the overall function of the ecosystem.
Our overall objective is to investigate how agricultural systems can be managed to minimize the environmental impact of agriculture without sacrificing productivity—or conversely, to maximize the ecosystem services provided by agriculture, including productivity.
Section snippets
Material and methods
We compared ecosystem services from a field experiment that was established at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) in 1988 (Robertson and Hamilton, 2014). Multiple treatments at the KBS Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Site (www.lter.kbs.msu.edu) Main Cropping System Experiment form a management intensity gradient that is well suited to ecosystem comparisons. Kellogg Biological Station is located in SW Michigan, within the northern boundary of the U.S. corn belt (85° 24′W, 42° 24′N). The
Results
Soil carbon levels to 1 m depth ranged from 6.5 (±0.8) kg C m−2 in the reduced input to 10.4 (±1.5) kg C m−2 in the alfalfa system (Table 2). Soil C/N ratios in the A/Ap horizon also showed a wide range of values, from 9.4 (±0.2) in the alfalfa system to 12.4 (±0.4) in the deciduous forest. Soil gravimetric water content in July was highest in the deciduous forest, no-till, and poplar systems, with 0.14, 0.13, and 0.13 g water g−1 soil, respectively. Average July soil water content was lowest in the
Discussion
Ecosystems along our management intensity gradient varied markedly in their delivery of ecosystem services, even within broad community types such as grain-based row crops or successional communities. Within row crops, for example, management caused large differences in the capacity of each system to deliver enhanced soil quality, climate regulation, groundwater recharge, plant diversity, and grain yield, even with similar levels of annual net primary productivity. Among the annual systems,
Acknowledgments
We thank S. VanderWulp, S. Bohm, S. Sippel, C. McMinn, J. Schuette, and many others for assistance in the field and lab. We also thank A.N. Kravchenko, M. Klug, A. Smucker, S. Swinton, and S.K Hamilton for many helpful suggestions and insightful comments. Financial support was provided by the US National Science Foundation LTER Program (DEB 1027253), the US DOE Office of Science (DE-FCO2-07ER64494), Michigan Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, and Office of Energy Efficiency
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