Urban and agricultural soils: conflicts and trade-offs in the optimization of ecosystem services
On-going human population growth and changing patterns of resource consumption
are increasing global demand for ecosystem services, many of which are provided by
soils. Some of these ecosystem services are linearly related to the surface area of pervious
soil, whereas others show non-linear relationships, making ecosystem service optimization a
complex task. As limited land availability creates conflicting demands among various types
of land use, a central challenge is how to weigh these conflicting interests and how to
achieve the best solutions possible from a perspective of sustainable societal development.
These conflicting interests become most apparent in soils that are the most heavily used by
humans for specific purposes: urban soils used for green spaces, housing, and other
infrastructure and agricultural soils for producing food, fibres and biofuels. We argue that,
despite their seemingly divergent uses of land, agricultural and urban soils share common
features with regards to interactions between ecosystem services, and that the trade-offs
associated with decision-making, while scale- and context-dependent, can be surprisingly
similar between the two systems. We propose that the trade-offs within land use types and
their soil-related ecosystems services are often disproportional, and quantifying these will
enable ecologists and soil scientists to help policy makers optimizing management decisions
when confronted with demands for multiple services under limited land availability.
SETAALA H.;
BARDGETT R.D.;
BIRKHOFER K.;
BRADY M.;
BYRNE L.;
DE RUITER Peter;
DE VRIES F.;
GARDI Ciro;
HEDLUND K.;
HEMERIK L.;
HOTES S.;
LIIRI M.;
MORTIMER Simon R;
PAVAO-ZUCKERMAN M.;
POUYAT R.;
TSIAFOULI Maria;
VAN DER PUTTEN Wim;
2014-05-05
SPRINGER
JRC82162
1083-8155,
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11252-013-0311-6,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC82162,
10.1007/s11252-013-0311-6,
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