1. Multifunctional Landscapes: Ecosystem Services and
economics
M. Cristina Negri
Principal Agronomist, Argonne National Laboratory
Soil and Water Conservation Society 72nd International Annual Conference
Madison, Wisconsin.
negri@anl.gov
2. Of Ecosystem Services, or the benefits people obtain from
ecosystems
(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2003)
Provisioning services
Products obtained from ecosystems
Feed
Fresh water
Food
Fiber
Bio-chemicals
Genetic resources
Regulating Services
Benefits obtained from regulation of ecosystem
processes
Climate regulation
Disease regulation
Water regulation
Water purification
Pollination
Cultural Services
Nonmaterial Benefits obtained from ecosystems
Spiritual and religious
Recreation and ecotourism
Aesthetic
Inspirational
Educational
Sense of place
Cultural heritage
Supporting Services
Soil formation
Nutrient cycling
Primary production
3. Agriculture’s sustainability challenge
Providing food, feed, fiber, energy for a growing world population
Conserving soil, water and biodiversity, and decreasing greenhouse gases
Providing resilience to a changing climate
The rural-urban tension, urbanization and the loss of soil and land
3
E. Detaille, Charge of the 4th Hussars at the battle of Friedland, 14 June 1807 -
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10
Detaille_4th_French_hussar_at_Friedland.jpg
Source: U.S. Global Change Research Program
http://e360.yale.edu/feature
report_gives_sobering_view_of_warmings_imp
act_on_us/2166/
Seeding Our Future by R. L. Crouse.
4. Systems level problems demand multiple outcomes
http://res.cloudinary.com/dk-find-out/image/upload/q_80,w_1440/A-Getty-107758168_bp1kbk.jpg
Rural economics and developmentResource use
6. Sustainable land use intensification at the farm level
Bringing industrial ecology concepts to the field
6
Underproductive land + excess nitrate recycle + deep rooted bioenergy crop = integrated
landscape: sustained bioenergy production + environmental services + optimized farm revenue
7. Understanding site conditions and marginality
Crop Yield
VERIS® soil mapping and image provided by Farm Map Solutions, LLC.
Hamada et al., 2015
8. Economic losses and environmental concerns often go together
8
Net profit ($/ac)
AVG ($/acre) = 153
STD ($/acre) = 230
Nitrate 6 ft bgs
12. Rethinking the Agricultural Landscape
12
Indian Creek watershed, IL
Fairbury site, IL
Soil drainage
Surface water
ponding
Crop
productivity
index
Nitrate leaching
Pesticide
leaching
Flooding
frequency
13. Design including
bioenergy and
water quality
Watershed design for ecosystem services on “marginal lands”
13
Current
land use
Watershed landscape
designs that improve
water quality also
seem to improve
pollinator nesting
index (InVEST model)
Tile- nitrate leachate Sediment yield Pollinator nesting index Tile- nitrate leachate Sediment yield Pollinator nesting index
14. Opportunity costs and cost of water quality service
Sensitive to corn yields, at current prices a
perennial crop such as bioenergy willow
could represent a viable alternative in
underproductive subfield patches if there
were a market for it.
Christianson L, Tyndall J, Helmers M. Financial comparison of seven nitrate reduction
strategies for Midwestern agricultural drainage. Water Resources and Economics.
2013;2–3:30-56
-20
-10
0
10
20
30
40
Willow net revenue Opportunity cost lo Opportunity cost Hi
$/ton(biomass)
Net Revenue and Opportunity Cost
Assumes
biomass is sold
for a revenue
15. The value of the water
quality improvement alone
well surpasses the returns
from the crop
-$600
-$400
-$200
$0
$200
$400
$600
$800
$1,000
$1,200
$1,400
Returns from SWG Value of reductions in soil losses
Value of reductions in nitrogen losses
$1,351
-$427
Analysis in collaboration with S. Secchi and J. Heavey, SIU
16. What is needed to capitalize on this value?
Opportunities for a trading system
A certification grade assessment of the value traded
Data, data and data
A coordinated network of sites (observatories) and studies that can
provide a common approach and results from a diverse set of conditions
A coordinated effort in developing, incrementing and vetting modeling
tools that an provide low uncertainty, high accuracy predictive
information
17. To conclude
o Addressing multiple needs at the same time requires a broader view and a systems approach
o Eventually, sustainable agriculture it will require the valuation of ecosystem services in addition to the value of the
commodity produced
o It will take careful adjustments to diets, advances in productivity, and science-guided innovation to ensure that all
our children will have food to eat and a clean environment in which to thrive.
oWe all can make a difference through our choices and awareness.
18. Acknowledgements
Jules Cacho, Herbert Ssegane, Patty Campbell, Colleen Zumpf
The many student interns who help us every summer
The Livingston County NRCS and SWCD, Chad Watts,
Conservation Technology Information Center, the many
farmers providing their viewpoint, Eric Rund, Harold Reetz
and Paul Kilgus.
The Nassauer Lab, University of Michigan, and Secchi Lab,
Southern Illinois University.
This work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy
Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
Notas do Editor
For bioenergy, it is important to find its place to build the bioeconomy
Agriculture is the single largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for 40% of today’s global population. It is the largest source of income and jobs for poor rural households
Market openings helped bring about landscape transformations
Introduction of soybeans on the 20s
Introduction of haber bosch – allowed to alter rotations
Why cant we think of a perennial – annual integrated landscape?
Agricultural landscapes are complex systemsbut our current goals for their cropping are often simple
Agriculture is the oldest and largest geoengineering endeavor of humankind
Landscapes change - Can we drive this change to meet our needs?
Well this map showing the spatial variability of net profit for corn in our study site prior to any conservation practice implementation, may help to set up the conversation about intrafield production economics. I learned, last week at the international association for Landscape ecology conference that Iowa State University has done a similar analysis state wide. And like us, they see the same trends over time, where the same areas are underproductive year after year. So why do farmers still plant these are with grain crop? Well crop insurance higher corn prices mask these economic losses of these subfield areas.
In our field study site, on average the field was profitable ($153/ac), the high standard deviation ($230/ac) is indicative of the fact that the farmer was losing money in some subfield areas.
Geostatistical analysis results for the net profit map show that the farmer was losing at least $50 per acre on 16% of the field (orange to red areas)
One of the potential end goals of bioenergy crop integration is to reduce the overall field standard deviation in net profit ($230) by addressing those specific areas which are losing money
Now that we have identified areas that are economically underproductive, the next step was to see if those areas coincided with areas that are susceptible to environmental degradation
Confusion matrix: matching areas that simultaneously have low yield with nutrient hotspot
Figure 2: Spatially explicit field map of nitrate and nitrite nitrogen (NO3+NO2-N, mg L-1) concentration at 1.2m depth depicting field-scale NO3+NO2-N hotspots a month after corn planting (a). In addition to low yield areas, these nitrogen leachate hotspots are the next level of target soils to integrate bioenergy crops into agricultural landscapes. Figure 2a shows the temporal reduction in annual NO3+NO2-N leachate concentration (69% in second year after willow coppicing) in plots planted in willow instead of corn. While figure 2c demonstrates that part of the reduction in NO3+NO2-N leachate concentration is due to willow plant uptake (80 kgN ha-1yr-1) because of zero fertilizer application in willow plots.
Figure 2: Spatially explicit field map of nitrate and nitrite nitrogen (NO3+NO2-N, mg L-1) concentration at 1.2m depth depicting field-scale NO3+NO2-N hotspots a month after corn planting (a). In addition to low yield areas, these nitrogen leachate hotspots are the next level of target soils to integrate bioenergy crops into agricultural landscapes. Figure 2a shows the temporal reduction in annual NO3+NO2-N leachate concentration (69% in second year after willow coppicing) in plots planted in willow instead of corn. While figure 2c demonstrates that part of the reduction in NO3+NO2-N leachate concentration is due to willow plant uptake (80 kgN ha-1yr-1) because of zero fertilizer application in willow plots.
Coming from central Illinois, where one of the dominant land covers is some form of agriculture, land which in turn feeds into these large water systems, there a need to think about how sustain these agricultural systems in such a way that still promotes growth in the future but limits the environmental impacts these practices have.
Bioenergy crop integration within the agricultural landscape has the potential to improve both the sustainability of the system by providing additional regulating services, but also to optimize the provisioning services: energy, food and conservation, at multiple scales.
However, the strategic placement of bioenergy crops within the agricultural landscape at these multiple scales is key! For example our field site in Fairbury, IL has portions in which we classify as marginal, where marginal is defined as land that is either susceptible to environmental degradation, is economically underproductive or both. In our case, the upland portion of our field has a high risk of runoff, is susceptible to nitrate leaching, and has low crop productivity. These are the types of areas we target for bioenergy crop integration, in this case short rotation shrub willow, as a buffer to have the largest impact upon the system in terms of nitrate reduction and nutrient recovery. The same concept applies at the watershed scale. Our watershed is the Indian Creek watershed (which 87% is in agriculture with 104 farms). Its at the headwater of the Vermillion river watershed which is nitrate impaired. This flows into the Illinois river (who watershed is dominated by agriculture), onto the Mississippi River and into the Gulf of Mexico which are all impaired in some way.
So this talk will focus on the viability of this type of system as a conservation practice in the Midwest as well as economically as a bioenergy cropping system.
Bioenergy crop integration not only has the potential to address nutrient reduction which:
Illinois Nutrient Reduction Strategy mirrors the goals of the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico Task force goals (45% reduction in nitrate nitrogen and total phosphorus by 2035.
And biofuel production: From an energy standpoint, biofuel production addresses the Energy independence and security act of 2007, where renewable fuel mandates that 16 billion gallons of 36 billions gallons of biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks are to be annually produced by 2022, but also other synergistic ecological and environmental services including pollinator habitat and carbon sequestration
Provisioning services: products obtained from ecosystems (food, water, fiber, biochemical, genetic resources)
Regulating services: benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem services (climate, disease, water regulation, water purification, pollination)
Cultural services: nonmaterial benefits obtained from the ecosystem (spiritual, recreation, aesthetic, inspirational, educational, ecotourism, cultural heritage)
Supporting services: services necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services 9soil formation, nutrient cycling, primary production)
This slide shows how a transition to a BAU to a landscape that incorporate perennial bioenergy crops in low productivity and environmentally vulnerable land has the potential to reduce sediment and nitrate loadings to surface water. It also shows how this alternative design centered around water quality can also favorably impact the pollinator nesting index.
Costs vary based on:
N removal % : 40-80% [literature]
Nitrate leachate: 20-50 kg N/ ha [literature]
Net revenue [Ecowillow]