Food, Fiber, Fuel, and Function: Pathways and Policies to balance economic, social and environmental services for Canada’s working landscapes

Ecosystem services (ES) are the benefits that people obtain from nature, including food, fiber, and freshwater; recreation; and regulation of climate, disease, and floods. A Canadian future of shared health and prosperity will depend on our ability to manage ecosystems and all the services they provide for human well-being now and in the future. In working landscapes – land actively used for production of resources such as food, fish, energy, or forest products – the focus has been on the cheap, reliable, and efficient production of individual ES. But these efforts often overlook the fact that landscapes simultaneously produce multiple ES that interact in complex, dynamic ways leading to increases in a few services (e.g., food, timber, energy) at the cost of declines in many others (e.g., flood control, recreation, carbon storage). Reaching consensus about how to provide for a variety of present and future human ES needs equitably, while safeguarding sustainable ecosystems for the future, requires evidence-based management strategies and a scalable natural resource science that embraces the complexity of social-ecological systems. Our collection draws on a unique network of academics and decision-makers recently funded by NSERC’s Strategic Network program. The mission of the new network, NSERC ResNet, is to transform Canada’s capacity to monitor, model, and manage its working landscapes and all the ES they provide to improve decision making. Ultimately, ResNet hopes to provide for long-term well-being of Canadians by improving integrated decision-making for working landscapes in Canada, and to showcase Canada as a model system for understanding these issues elsewhere. Our special issue introduces the network, our knowledge about its landscapes (case studies) and develops the first integrated understanding of its themes.

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A scoping review of the digital agricultural revolution and ecosystem services: implications for Canadian policy and research agendas
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1955 - 1985
The application of technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, cellular agriculture, and big data analytics to food systems has been described as a digital agricultural revolution with the potential to increase food security and reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint. Yet, the scientific evidence informing how these technologies may impact or enhance ecosystem services has not been comprehensively reviewed. In this scoping review, we examine how digital agricultural technologies may enhance agriculture’s support of ecosystem services. Keyword searches in academic databases resulted in 2337 records, of which 74 records met review criteria and were coded. We identify three clusters of digital agricultural technologies including those that make farm management more precise, increase connectivity, and create novel foods. We then examine modelling and empirical evidence gaps in research linking these technologies to ecosystem services. Finally, we overview barriers to implementing digital agricultural technologies for better ecosystem services management in the Canadian context including economic and political systems; lack of policies on data management, governance, and cybersecurity; and limited training and human resources that prevents producers from fully utilizing these technologies.
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Managing Canada’s land- and seascapes for multiple ecosystem services in the Anthropocene: introduction to the Food, Fiber, Fuel, and Function collection
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1986 - 1992
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Ecosystem services decision support tools: exploring the implementation gap in Canada
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1864 - 1880
This paper explores the degree to which the ecosystem services (ES) concept and related tools have been integrated and implemented within the Canadian government context at both the provincial/territorial and federal levels. The research goals of the study were to qualitatively assess the extent to which ES assessment is being integrated at different levels of government, consider the barriers to implementation, and draw lessons from the development and use of Canada’s Ecosystem Services Toolkit: Completing and Using Ecosystem Service Assessment for Decision-Making—An Interdisciplinary Toolkit for Managers and Analysts (2017), jointly developed by a federal, provincial, and territorial government task force. Primary data were collected through targeted semi-structured interviews with key informants combined with a content analysis of ES-related documentation from government websites. Results indicate that while the term ES is found in documentation across different levels of government, there appears to be an ES implementation gap. Issues of conceptual understanding, path dependency, a lack of regulatory mandate, lost staff expertise, and competition with overlapping conceptual approaches were identified as barriers to ES uptake. Areas requiring further policy and research attention are identified.
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Opportunities and trade-offs for expanding agriculture in Canada’s North: an ecosystem service perspective
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1728 - 1752
Climate change will create warmer temperatures, greater precipitation, and longer growing seasons in northern latitudes making agriculture increasingly possible in boreal regions. To assess the potential of any such expansion, this paper provides a first-order approximation of how much land could become suitable for four staple crops (corn, potato, soy, and wheat) in Canada by 2080. In addition, we estimate how the environmental trade-offs of northern agricultural expansion will impact critical ecosystem services. Primarily, we evaluate how the regulatory ecosystem services of carbon storage and sequestration and the habitat services supporting biodiversity would be traded for the provisioning services of food production. Here we show that under climate change projected by Canadian Earth System Model (CanESM2) Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5, ∼1.85 million km² of land may become suitable for farming in Canada’s North, which, if utilized, would lead to the release of ∼15 gigatonnes of carbon if all forests and wetlands are cleared and plowed. These land-use changes would also have profound implications for Indigenous sovereignty and the governance of protected and conserved areas in Canada. These results highlight that research is urgently needed so that stakeholders can become aware of the scope of potential economic opportunities, cultural issues, and environmental trade-offs required for agricultural sustainability in Canada.
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Monitoring social–ecological networks for biodiversity and ecosystem services in human-dominated landscapes
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1670 - 1692
The demand the human population is placing on the environment has triggered accelerated rates of biodiversity change and created trade-offs among the ecosystem services we depend upon. Decisions designed to reverse these trends require the best possible information obtained by monitoring ecological and social dimensions of change. Here, we conceptualize a network framework to monitor change in social–ecological systems. We contextualize our framework within Ostrom’s social–ecological system framework and use it to discuss the challenges of monitoring biodiversity and ecosystem services across spatial and temporal scales. We propose that spatially explicit multilayer and multiscale monitoring can help estimate the range of variability seen in social–ecological systems with varying levels of human modification across the landscape. We illustrate our framework using a conceptual case study on the ecosystem service of maple syrup production. We argue for the use of analytical tools capable of integrating qualitative and quantitative knowledge of social–ecological systems to provide a causal understanding of change across a network. Altogether, our conceptual framework provides a foundation for establishing monitoring systems. Operationalizing our framework will allow for the detection of ecosystem service change and assessment of its drivers across several scales, informing the long-term sustainability of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
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Next steps for ecosystem service models: integrating complex interactions and beneficiaries
- Hugo Thierry,
- Lael Parrott, and
- Brian Robinson
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1649 - 1669
Accounting for ecosystem services (ES)—the ways in which society and people directly benefit from ecological processes and functions—is crucial for developing sustainable landscape management approaches that consider the interrelationship between people and nature. Previous research has produced models that estimate the provision of potential ES by landscapes to help inform policy and stakeholder decision-making. However, most modelling efforts do not consider the delivery of ES to specific human populations or communities, making it difficult to evaluate any possible human welfare implications from alternative land use planning scenarios. In this paper, we first explore the recent state of science of ES modelling from the perspective of ES provision and delivery to the people that benefit from them. Second, we propose the addition of some essential aspects of complexity using the classic social–ecological system framework, crucial for developing models to inform pragmatic decision-making. Our propositions are illustrated using simplified examples inspired by sea otter conservation in the seascapes of British Columbia. Integrating these concepts in future ES models should serve as a baseline for future management approaches that more adequately capture the important implications of landscape scenarios on human well-being.
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A systematic conservation planning approach to maintaining ecosystem service provision in working landscapes
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1570 - 1600
Balancing human well-being with the maintenance of ecosystem services (ES) for future generations has become one of the central sustainability challenges of the 21st century. In working landscapes, past and ongoing production-centered objectives have resulted in the conversion of ecosystems into simple land-use types, which has also altered the provision of most ES. These inevitable trade-offs between the efficient production of individual provisioning ES and the maintenance of regulating and cultural ES call for the development of a land-use strategy based on the multifunctional use of the landscape. Due to the heterogeneous nature of working landscapes, both protection and restoration actions are needed to improve their multifunctionality. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) offers a decision support framework that can support landscape multifunctionality by indicating where ES management efforts should be implemented. We describe an approach that we developed to include ES provision protection and restoration objectives in SCP with the goal of providing ongoing benefits to society. We explain the general framework of this approach and discuss concepts, challenges, innovations, and prospects for the further development of a comprehensive decision support tool. We illustrate our approach with two case studies implemented in the pan-Canadian project ResNet.
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Understanding multifunctional Bay of Fundy dykelands and tidal wetlands using ecosystem services—a baseline
FACETS • Vol. 6 • pp. 1446 - 1473
We review what is known about ecosystem service (ES) delivery from agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands around the dynamic Bay of Fundy in the face of climate change and sea-level rise, at the outset of the national NSERC ResNet project. Agricultural dykelands are areas of drained tidal wetland that have been converted to agricultural lands and protected using dykes and aboiteaux (one-way drains or sluices), first introduced by early French settlers (Acadians). Today, Nova Scotia’s 242 km system of dykes protect 17,364 ha of increasingly diverse land uses—including residential, industrial, and commercial uses as well as significant tourism, recreational, and cultural amenities—and is undergoing system modernization and adaptation. Different ES are provided by drained and undrained landscapes such as agriculture from dykelands and regulating services from wetlands, but more complex dynamics exist when beneficiaries are differentiated. This review reveals many knowledge gaps about ES delivery and dynamics, including around net greenhouse gas implications, storm protection, water quality, fish stocks, pollination processes, sense of place, and aesthetics, some of which may reveal shared ES or synergies instead of trade-offs. We emphasize the need to be open to adapting ES concepts and categorizations to fully understand Indigenous implications of these land use decisions.

Curators

Elena Bennett

Guest Editor

Evan Fraser

Guest Editor

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