Understanding farming practices to rethink land change transitions: a research challenge

Agriculture uses and manages dynamically 38% of the global land surface. Farming practices are evolving to intensify current farming systems in parallel with the expansion or the abandonment of exploited surfaces, under systems of constraints and opportunities ranging from local to global scales. Moreover, major agricultural land changes are prospected by near future scenarios for increasing in global population and improvement of standards of living for poorest regions. As a result, agriculture is undertaking a wide range of rapid adaptations whose consequences are too subtle to be consistently observed in the short-middle term by global or regional monitoring, such as remote sensing techniques. Nonetheless, these evolutions impact the land system management at increasingly wider scales. Accordingly agronomy has been called anew to integrate farming practices on grazed and cultivated fields in the wider spatial context (Benoit, Rizzo et al. 2012, Landscape Ecol. 27:1385-1394). In this session we will discuss how a better understanding of farming practices can help rethinking land change transitions (theme 1). The underpinning aim is promoting a greater involvement of agronomy in the evolution of a multidisciplinary approach to the land system management. We will structure our session on three main challenges. First, reflecting on the theoretical frameworks adopted by several disciplines in the study of agricultural land transitions at different scales and from different perspectives. We will focus on the rural landscapes management as a major cross-disciplinary study object to increase the synergy among agronomy, geography, and ecology within the land system science. Second, improving methods to describe and understand agricultural land change transitions. Farming practices, with their continuous adaptability to the evolving context (e.g., climate change, price volatility, farm household strategies, etc.) translate relevantly the large variability of agricultural land changes over time and space on Earth. Nevertheless many difficulties remain to integrate them in the analysis of the land systems. For that, we will evaluate existing and emerging methods that tackle farming practices at regional and wider levels. Third, enhancing the assessment and design of farming systems to deal with multiple issues. Short term issues for agricultural land use (e.g., feeding the world and increasing the production of biomass for energy) are faced with long term issues of resource management (e.g., freshwater protection, biodiversity conservation). We will focus on some examples about the spatial allocation of crop patterns – and of the associated farming practices – to question how environmental and societal needs can be met.