Tosh, C.R., Staton, T., Costanzo, A. et al. (1 more author) (2024) Biotic stress and yield stability in English organic silvoarable agroforestry. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 44. 46. ISSN 1774-0746
Abstract
In-field trees are thought to buffer arable crops from climate extremes through the creation of microclimates that may reduce the impacts of heat, wind, and cold. Much less is known about how trees and their biotic interactions (e.g. with natural enemies of pests and wild understory plants) impact crop yield stability to biotic stresses such as crop pests and disease. Modelling these interactions using conventional approaches is complex and time consuming, and we take a simplified approach, representing the agroecosystem as a Boolean regulatory network and parameterising Boolean functions using expert opinion. This allies our approach with decision analysis, which is increasingly finding applications in agriculture. Despite the naivety of our model, we demonstrate that it outputs complex and realistic agroecosystem dynamics. It predicts that, in English silvoarable, the biotic interactions of in-field trees boost arable crop yield overall, but they do not increase yield stability to biotic stress. Sensitivity analysis shows that arable crop yield is very sensitive to disease and weeds. We suggest that the focus of studies and debate on ecosystem service provision by English agroforestry needs to shift from natural enemies and pests to these ecosystem components. We discuss how our model can be improved through validation and parameterisation using real field data. Finally, we discuss how our approach can be used to rapidly model systems (agricultural or otherwise) than can be represented as dynamic interaction networks.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2024. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Agroforestry; Silvoarable; Crop yield; Agroecology; Boolean regulatory network |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > Institute of Integrative and Comparative Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 18 Nov 2024 15:49 |
Last Modified: | 18 Nov 2024 15:49 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Springer Nature |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s13593-024-00979-z |
Related URLs: | |
Sustainable Development Goals: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:219724 |