Integrating organizations, disciplines and scales to develop sustainable agro-ecosystems: a pathway for the Consortium?

Agricultural research is often hampered by large spatial and temporal variability of agro-ecosystems. Moreover, most research has been conducted in a monodisciplinary way so far, and at sites of unknown representativeness. This makes the results site-specific and difficult to extrapolate. Evaluation of existing methodologies for land use planning reveals that the `ideal' method for developing sustainable agro-ecosystems should include: integration of disciplines, farmers' goals and planners' visions,quantification of processes in agro-ecosystems, scale-specific identification of constraints, and upscaling and downscaling of research results