Sustainability issues in agro-ecology: Socio-ecological perspective

Abstract

In the recent past there has been concern to address the declining trends and deteriorating ecological elements and their functions in pro-ductive agricultural landscapes. The efforts to revive the ecological functions needs multiple scale approach, which include scientific under-standing, time dependent restorative activities and incorporation of wisdom of the stakeholders. Conservation initiatives linked to precision farm-ing is an apt mechanism to minimize the loss of natural resources of agricultural landscapes to maintain the complex stabilizers of ecological functions. Such an effort must address the sci-entific evaluation of the farm as “ecologically sustainable unit ” with due consideration to so-cial construct at local to regional level. Sustaina-bility indices can be useful tools for evaluating the farms to isolate degradative factors and iden-tify ecologically conservative practices. This re-view will analyze certain inter-linked concepts relevant to address the sustainability issues in agro-ecology at the interface of socio-ecological perspective