Biodiversity-based cropping systems: A long-term perspective is necessary.

Biodiversity-based cropping systems are an interesting option to address the many challenges that agriculture faces. However, benefits of these systems should not obscure the fact that creating biodiversity-based cropping systems represents a major change for farmers. To address this challenge, we argue that designing biodiversity-based cropping systems requires transforming ecological concepts into technical opportunities. Indeed, integrating ecological concepts such as plant-soil feedback and plant functional traits more strongly into cropping system design offers promising opportunities for the provision of ecosystem services, such as pest and disease control, crop production (including crop yield stability), climate regulation and regulation of soil quality. Accordingly, we demonstrate that designing biodiversity-based cropping systems requires considering not only the short term but also the long term. This would ensure that the expected ecosystem services have enough time to build up and provide their full effects, that the cropping systems are resilient and that they avoid the limitations of short-term assessments, which do not sufficiently consider multi-year effects. Considering long-term consequences of system change - induced by biodiversity - is essential to identify potential trade-offs between ecosystem services, as well as agricultural obstacles to and mechanisms of change. Including farmers and other food-chain actors in cropping system design would help find acceptable compromises that consider not only the provision of ecosystem services, but also other dimensions related to economic viability, workload or the technical feasibility of crops, which are identified as major obstacles to crop diversification. This strategy represents an exciting research front for the development of agroecological cropping systems.

A dataset for sustainability assessment of agroecological practices in a crop-livestock farming system.

This article presents data designed by European researchers who performed a literature review and interpreted the results to determine impact factors of many agroecological practices on a wide variety of sustainability indicators. The impact factors are represented in a matrix that connects practices to indicators. The indicators are related to environmental, economic and social sustainability of a typical European integrated crop-livestock farm. The data are included in the serious game SEGAE to learn agroecology, as described in "SEGAE: a serious game to learn agroecology" [1]. The data can be modified to adapt the game to other agricultural systems. Finally, the data can be re-used in research projects as a basis to assess impacts of agroecological practices.

Survey data from 38 integrated crop-livestock farming systems in Western France.

This paper presents data collected from 38 integrated crop-livestock farming systems in Ille-et-Vilaine, Brittany, France, during face-to-face surveys. Surveys were conducted using a quantitative questionnaire to collect information about farm management practices that affect nitrogen (N) inputs, N outputs, and internal N flows. The data were used to develop new indicators of N efficiency (SyNE, System N Efficiency) and of N balance (SyNB, System N Balance), as described in "SyNE: An improved indicator to assess nitrogen efficiency of farming systems" [1]. Also, the data were used to test an online tool developed to calculate these indicators, as described in "A free online tool to calculate three nitrogen-related indicators for farming systems" [2]. The data are provided with this article.