Agricultural ecosystems" component of the French Evaluation of Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services.

Summary The ambition of the INRA "EFESE-EA" study is to describe the mechanisms and determinants of the provision of ecosystem services by agricultural ecosystems on the basis of a review of existing knowledge, and to assess them on a national scale on the basis of indicators defined in the framework of the study. The organization of the work, as planned at the beginning of the study, was sequential: (1) biophysical identification and specification of a list of agricultural goods and ecosystem services. (2) biophysical valuation: quantification of the level of provision of the goods and services identified in step (1) (3) economic valuation: quantification of the economic value of the services (most often in a monetary unit) In the time available for the study, the group of experts gave priority to the biophysical components (1) and (2) in order to : - to investigate the conceptualization of goods and services (part 1) in a robust manner: this work constitutes a current research front, associated with an abundant but sometimes unstabilized academic literature, which the group of experts has endeavored to analyze in order to propose argued conceptualization choices. - to push the biophysical assessment exercise (part 2) as far as possible within the framework of the initial request made by the MEEM: to map the production of a wide range of agricultural goods and the SE rendered by agricultural ecosystems at the finest possible spatial resolution, and on the scale of France as a whole. It should be noted that since this exercise does not constitute a research project but rather an INRA institutional study (in the sense of DEPE procedures), all of the assessments developed in this report are based on existing data, and no experimental work aimed at acquiring new field data has been conducted. The result of this choice of prioritization is that: - the economic evaluation component (3) has been initiated for some SEs but is not very well developed compared to components (1) and (2). - while taking care to develop traceable and robust biophysical assessment methodologies, the experts decided to propose more exploratory methodologies for a few ES for which current data do not allow for a direct assessment of the level of provision on the scale of the whole of France: In these particular cases (explicitly indicated in the sections of the report that deal with them), the methodologies were implemented until the mapping was completed, with the aim of showing the potential that these methodologies offer and the nature of the results that they can produce, provided that they are validated for the whole of France, rather than with the aim of interpreting the results obtained for themselves The experts were therefore particularly concerned to put the quantitative results thus produced into perspective, and to accompany the maps with a detailed description of the validation protocols that would have to be implemented in the follow-up to the study to stabilize and validate these exploratory methodologies. This bias on the part of the EFESE-agricultural ecosystems working group is compatible with the objective of the EFESE program, which is to produce a methodological guide for the evaluation of goods and services by pointing out the limits, difficulties, precautions and possible improvements associated with each of the avenues put forward.