Agriculture is currently facing many challenges with the decline in biodiversity and the provision of ecosystem services from the agroecosystem. Crop diversification, together with New field arrangements by considering field heterogeneities, stand as an option to improve the provision of ecosystem services as well as the promotion of biodiversity. Moreover, agroecosystem models can serve as a tool to contribute in the design of new field arrangements as it offers the possibility to conduct virtual experiments to generate information that can be further used in the design of newly diversified fields. For the first research question we wanted ot explore To what extent agroecosystem models have been used for crop diversification design at field and landscape scale by considering soil heterogeneities?. In a second part, As field heterogeneities are relevant in the design of new field arrangements, we explore a second research question: Is the model capable of simulating crop responses to within field heterogeneities? Preliminary results are presented for these research questions.
Ixchel M. Hernández-Ochoa, Frank Ewert, Thomas Döring, Thomas Gaiser, Wulf Amelung, Lasse Klingbeil, Uwe Rascher, Ribana Roscher
