Outline of the Scheyern Project

Agricultural practices have undergone intense changes, which are evidenced by significant advances in technology and mechanization, specialization of agricultural undertakings, discontinuation of labor-intensive farming branches, increased field size, drainage of wetlands, and the removal of hedges and boundary strips. Understanding ecosystems as functional units that contain organisms interacting with each other and the abiotic environment, agricultural systems have to be regarded and classified as specific ecosystems. Contrary to natural systems, human activities interfere in agrosystems with almost all structural elements and processes in order to enhance productivity, secure yields and foster selected species-all to supply food and energy to a food web outside of the agricultural ecosystem. This chapter provides an introduction to the Scheyern project, which aims to tackle problems of intensive agriculture and to propose novel solutions for agroecosystem management. The project establishes guidelines for an ecologically compatible, site-adequate, and sustainable management of rural landscapes, while maintaining high productivity levels. An extensive research concept was elaborated in order to acquire such guidelines. This agroecosystem-oriented, interdisciplinary research aimed to record, assess, forecast, and evaluate the time course of the environmental and socio-economic impacts of management-induced, changes on different structural and scale levels. Recommendations are made to analyze and classify ecosystems according to their dominating processes, specific structures, or functions.