Agroecosystems provide humans with food, fibers and energy and cover about 40% of the land surface globally. Technological change in agriculture (e.g. mechanization, irrigation, fertilizer use, crop breeding) has greatly increased agricultural productivity but had -and still has- often unintended environmental consequences which involve the pollution and depletion of water resources, degradation of soils and emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). Sustainable intensification of agricultural production is promoted to solve the apparent trade-off between the need to increase production and reduce environmental impacts at the same time – yet the different options to do so and the global potential remain unclear. Ecosystem models can be used to analyze, quantify and project the relevant processes and fluxes to study biogeochemical consequences and agricultural productivity under changing practices and conditions.
However, agricultural management is often only rudimentarily represented in global-scale ecosystem and biogeochemical models. Given the limited availability of input and reference data, management processes are difficult to represent as well as to parametrize, and subsequently often omitted.
This session will focus on the representation of agricultural management aspects in ecosystem models and how these can be applied at large scales. We welcome contributions on methods for modeling agricultural management as well as spatially explicit datasets. Moreover, studies that involve implications of agricultural management on GHG emissions, crop productivity and soil degradation are particularly welcome.