Agroecosystem Health Initiative – Assessing Agricultural Resources in Natural and Social Terms

We have often had requests from stakeholders for a methodology to assess Ohio agroecosystems and visualize their current state.  Agroecosystems include both people and the land, and function at watershed, community, and landscape scales.  Sustainable management of land and water resources requires a complex balance between environmental, social and economic objectives. 

While this concept is widely accepted, a major challenge is how to measure and integrate the many kinds of social and environmental data needed to describe an agroecosystem, using a rigorous scientific approach that can be applied to land use planning, watershed management and so forth.  We have developed a new methodology targeted at analyzing and understanding the holistic structure of agriculture, including its surrounding influences at the landscape and community level.  We have been using this approach to combine data on the biological and physical environment, economics, and information from social surveys and interviews. 

The resulting index represents the current state of the agroecosystem in terms of agroecosystem health:  productivity, sustainability, stability and equitability.  These data sets typically contain very different kinds of measurements, and the ability to combine these into a common basis that relates to agroecosystem health was a major accomplishment. The resulting information is being used within a GIS (Geographical Information Systems) framework for mapping studies of rural areas with the goal of visualizing and predicting changes in agroecosystem health over time.

Our partners, including farmers, land owners and managers, policy makers and communities, can use this tool to improve agroecosystem function and health at local and regional scales by improvements in land use and land management.

Contact Casey Hoy, hoy.1@osu.edu  for more information.