EcoGAP: Contributions of ecosystem services delivered by agro-ecological practices to narrow gaps in yield and resource use efficiency

This project targets increased agroecological transition of cropping systems, to enhance internal ecological processes, and make them less input dependent, more autonomous, and more resilient in the face of pests, diseases and climatic variation. We will do this by assessing the contributions of ecosystems services delivered by agroecological practices (AEPs), focusing on enhanced crop nutrition, weed management, and integrated crop management to reduce fertiliser and pesticide use. We thus propose three pathways to be embedded in a living lab (LL) approach (Fig. 1, WP2): i) The central scientific pathway is the concept of ‘ecological yield gap’, defined as the degree of divergence between attainable and actual yield and resource use efficiency attributable to unrealised ecosystem service provision (van Ittersum et al., 2025). This concept explicitly targets the agronomic role of ecosystem services in interaction with the other inputs, while accounting for different farming contexts (climate, soil and socio-economics) (Fig. 1, WP1); ii) We apply the concept to data from a comprehensive set of available cropping system experiments along a north to south gradient across Sweden, the Netherlands, and France to evaluate services provided along a continuum of increasing AEP adoption (Fig. 1, WP3). These experiments include organic inputs and integrated crop management practices (diversification, cultivar and cropping strategy, soil, water and nutrient management), to improve crop nutrition, weed, pest and disease management; iii) We also apply the ecological yield gap concept to comprehensive data of a spectrum of practices from farm networks (Fig. 1, WP4). Farms operate at different levels of transition towards sustainable systems, implementing principles from the continuum of agroecological principles to various degrees.