Potential of legume-based grassland-livestock systems in Europe

European grassland-based livestock production systems face the challenge of producing more meat and milk to meet increasing world demands and to achieve this using fewer resources. Legumes offer great potential for achieving these objectives. They have numerous features that can act together at different stages in the soil–plant–animal–atmosphere system, and these are most effective in mixed swards with a legume proportion of 30–50%. The resulting benefits include reduced dependence on fossil energy and industrial N-fertilizer, lower quantities of harmful emissions to the environment (greenhouse gases and nitrate), lower production costs, higher productivity and increased protein self-sufficiency. Some legume species offer opportunities for improving animal health with less medication, due to the presence of bioactive secondary metabolites. In addition, legumes may offer an adaptation option to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations and climate change. Legumes generate these benefits at the level of the managed land-area unit and also at the level of the final product unit. However, legumes suffer from some limitations, and suggestions are made for future research to exploit more fully the opportunities that legumes can offer. In conclusion, the development of legume-based grassland–livestock systems undoubtedly constitutes one of the pillars for more sustainable and competitive ruminant production systems, and it can be expected that forage legumes will become more important in the future

Impact of droughts on the carbon cycle in European vegetation : a probabilistic risk analysis using six vegetation models

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Role of Grasslands and Grassland Management for Biogeochemical Cycles and Biodiversity. Setting up Long-Term Manipulation Experiments in France

Land use for grassland is recognised to have some beneficial effects for biodiversity and the environment: (i) regulation of the water cycle and protection of soils against erosion, (ii) accumulation of organic matter in soil and sequestration of atmospheric C, (iii) regulation of the N cycle and attenuation of the risk for N leaching, (iv) recycling of nutrients and improvement of soil quality, (v) improvement of biodiversity of vegetation, soil microbes and micro- and meso-fauna. All these effects depend upon the management of the grassland: cutting vs. grazing, stocking density, level of N inputs. Management decisions often result from short- term objectives, whereas the soil-vegetation interactions are long-term processes. Therefore, a steady state is usually not reached, which makes it difficult to determine the overall environmental effects of changes in land use and in grassland management

Adapting agriculture to climate change

The strong trends in climate change already evident, the likelihood of further changes occurring, and the increasing scale of potential climate impacts give urgency to addressing agricultural adaptation more coherently. There are many potential adaptation options available for marginal change of existing agricultural systems, often variations of existing climate risk management. We show that implementation of these options is likely to have substantial benefits under moderate climate change for some cropping systems. However, there are limits to their effectiveness under more severe climate changes. Hence, more systemic changes in resource allocation need to be considered, such as targeted diversification of production systems and livelihoods. We argue that achieving increased adaptation action will necessitate integration of climate change-related issues with other risk factors, such as climate variability and market risk, and with other policy domains, such as sustainable development. Dealing with the many barriers to effective adaptation will require a comprehensive and dynamic policy approach covering a range of scales and issues, for example, from the understanding by farmers of change in risk profiles to the establishment of efficient markets that facilitate response strategies. Science, too, has to adapt. Multidisciplinary problems require multidisciplinary solutions, i.e., a focus on integrated rather than disciplinary science and a strengthening of the interface with decision makers. A crucial component of this approach is the implementation of adaptation assessment frameworks that are relevant, robust, and easily operated by all stakeholders, practitioners, policymakers, and scientists

The 4 per 1000 initiative.

Soil organic matter is at the nexus of global challenges: food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, soil security. The 4 per 1000 initiative, launched at the Climate COP21 within the Lima-Paris Action Agenda proposes to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks to simultaneously address all these challenges. It directly addresses three sustainable development goals: SDG2 ?no hunger?, SDG13 ?Climate action?, and SDG15 ?Life on land? and indirectly concerns several others. The initiative targets agricultural soils in priority, which are often the most degraded soils and because of the high expected benefits in terms of soil fertility and hence of productivity. A range of agricultural practices are available that allow to increase SOC stocks while ensuring a resilient, productive and environmentally friendly agriculture, so that a large-scale deployment can be aimed at. Here, we review and discuss the main limits and criticisms addressed to the 4 per 1000 initiative

Belowground DNA-based techniques: untangling the network of plant root interactions

Contains fulltext : 91591.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)7 p

Climate, COVID-19 and conflict threaten health, food security and nutrition

September 2021 saw the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) take place in New York. It focused on the “three Cs” that are driving disruption to food systems and threatening recent progress in mitigating hunger, malnutrition, and undernutrition: global environmental climate change, covid-19 disease, and conflict. Summit delegates from 183 countries agreed that business as usual would not lead to the change necessary to achieve the sustainable development goals. Summit participants called for urgent action at scale. The three Cs interact on five mediators (“five Fs”) upon which food systems depend: the geopolitics of our global food, fertilizer, finance, fodder, and fuel systems (fig 1). Our global food supply system is fragile and vulnerable to the impacts of each driver or mediator. However, all can interact to amplify the downstream effects on people, their health, and diets. For example, decreased food availability has financial impacts (and vice versa). In a vicious feedback loop, undernutrition affects the ability to produce food, and lack of food availability can lead to conflict (and vice versa), while environmental climate change can cause both. Key messages • Global environmental climate change can lead to challenges related to health, food security, and nutrition • Environmental climate change interacts with covid-19 and conflict, and drives food insecurity and malnutrition • Every public policy choice has opportunities, threats, and trade-offs that can affect health, food security, and nutrition for communities directly and indirectly through supply and market challenges, conflict, and geopolitic

Evaluating the Potential of Legumes to Mitigate N2_{2}O Emissions From Permanent Grassland Using Process-Based Models

A potential strategy for mitigating nitrous oxide (N$_{2}$O) emissions from permanent grasslands is the partial substitution of fertilizer nitrogen (N$_{fert}$) with symbiotically fixed nitrogen (N$_{symb}$) from legumes. The input of N$_{symb}$ reduces the energy costs of producing fertilizer and provides a supply of nitrogen (N) for plants that is more synchronous to plant demand than occasional fertilizer applications. Legumes have been promoted as a potential N$_{2}$O mitigation strategy for grasslands, but evidence to support their efficacy is limited, partly due to the difficulty in conducting experiments across the large range of potential combinations of legume proportions and fertilizer N inputs. These experimental constraints can be overcome by biogeochemical models that can vary legume‐fertilizer combinations and subsequently aid the design of targeted experiments. Using two variants each of two biogeochemical models (APSIM and DayCent), we tested the N$_{2}$O mitigation potential and productivity of full factorial combinations of legume proportions and fertilizer rates for five temperate grassland sites across the globe. Both models showed that replacing fertilizer with legumes reduced N$_{2}$O emissions without reducing productivity across a broad range of legume‐fertilizer combinations. Although the models were consistent with the relative changes of N$_{2}$O emissions compared to the baseline scenario (200 kg N ha$^{-1}$ yr$^{-1}$; no legumes), they predicted different levels of absolute N$_{2}$O emissions and thus also of absolute N$_{2}$O emission reductions; both were greater in DayCent than in APSIM. We recommend confirming these results with experimental studies assessing the effect of clover proportions in the range 30–50% and ≤150 kg N ha$^{-1}$ yr$^{-1}$ input as these were identified as best‐bet climate smart agricultural practices

Quality control of CarboEurope flux data – Part I: Footprint analyses to evaluate sites in forest ecosystems

International audienceWe applied a site evaluation approach combining Lagrangian Stochastic footprint modelling with a quality assessment approach for eddy-covariance data to 25 forested sites of the CarboEurope-IP network. The analysis addresses the spatial representativeness of the flux measurements, instrumental effects on data quality, spatial patterns in the data quality, and the performance of the coordinate rotation method. Our findings demonstrate that application of a footprint filter could strengthen the CarboEurope-IP flux database, since only one third of the sites is situated in truly homogeneous terrain. Almost half of the sites experience a significant reduction in eddy-covariance data quality under certain conditions, though these effects are mostly constricted to a small portion of the dataset. Reductions in data quality of the sensible heat flux are mostly induced by characteristics of the surrounding terrain, while the latent heat flux is subject to instrumentation-related problems. The Planar-Fit coordinate rotation proved to be a reliable tool for the majority of the sites using only a single set of rotation angles. Overall, we found a high average data quality for the CarboEurope-IP network, with good representativeness of the measurement data for the specified target land cover types