Christine De Sainte Marie

Integrating Agricultural and Ecological Goals into the Management of Species-Rich Grasslands: Learning from the Flowering Meadows Competition in France

Current agri-environmental schemes for reconciling agricultural production with biodiversity conservation are proving ineffective Europe-wide, increasing interest in results-based schemes (RBSs). We describe here the French “Flowering Meadows” competition, rewarding the “best agroecological balance” in semi-natural grasslands managed by livestock farmers. This competition, which was entered by about a thousand farmers in 50 regional nature parks between 2007 and 2014, explicitly promotes a new style of agri-environmental scheme focusing on an ability to reach the desired outcome rather than adherence to prescriptive management rules. Building on our experience in the design and monitoring of the competition, we argue that the cornerstone of successful RBSs is a collective learning process in which the reconciliation of agriculture and environment is reconsidered in terms of synergistic relationships between agricultural and ecological functioning. We present the interactive, iterative process by which we defined an original method for assessing species-rich grasslands in agroecological terms. This approach was based on the integration of new criteria, such as flexibility, feeding value, and consistency of use, into the assessment of forage production performance and the consideration of biodiversity conservation through its functional role within the grassland ecosystem, rather than simply noting the presence or abundance of species. We describe the adaptation of this methodology on the basis of competition feedback, to bring about a significant shift in the conventional working methods of agronomists and conservationists (including researchers).The potential and efficacy of RBSs for promoting ecologically sound livestock systems are discussed in the concluding remarks, and they relate to the ecological intensification debate.

Towards biodiversity-based livestock systems: review of evidence and options for improvement

A major challenge for livestock farming systems (LFSs) is to reconcile production with the management of natural resources, especially biodiversity and ecosystem services. Based on a review of research conducted on grassland- and rangeland-based LFSs, this paper addresses this challenge by analysing biodiversity as a product of and a key resource for LFSs. Although most studies reveal antagonisms between biodiversity and production, our findings show that it is possible to move towards synergies. The literature review sheds light on five points: (i) moving beyond an antagonistic view of biodiversity and production by considering biodiversity as a resource requires new criteria for biodiversity categorization from a taxonomic view to a functional one; (ii) functional biodiversity (both domestic and wild) considered as a resource provides beneficial properties (e.g. stability and resilience) to LFSs; (iii) links between production and biodiversity cannot be simply summarized as having a negative impact of production intensity as management practices have various impacts on the different components of biodiversity; (iv) impact assessment studies linking management of LFSs and biodiversity reveal complex multi-level interactions between grassland or rangeland management and biodiversity; (v) a large range of management options are available to move towards biodiversitybased LFSs. We conclude that future research should address the challenge of collective management of wild biodiversity at higher levels of organization (landscapes, territories, etc.) and that such collective management would greatly benefit from the experience of domestic biodiversity.