How can landscape management be enhanced by farming systems ? A landscape agronomy perspective

Agronomists are faced to the multiple stakeholders’ landscape design as a rising issue in the management of farming systems. Furthermore, the European Landscape Convention (ELC) has formally acknowledged the expectations of local stakeholders and decision-makers for a greater support to protect manage and plan the landscapes. A renewed perspective of agronomy on landscape research has recently tried to tackle this challenge. This perspective, called “landscape agronomy” (LA), strives to widen again the agronomic spatial focus beyond the field or the farm to the landscape. For that, LA has proposed a conceptual model of agricultural landscapes to relate farming practices and natural resources with the continuous reshaping of land use patterns operated by farmers. Interpreting the ELC landscape definition accordingly, we consider that the character of agricultural landscapes results uppermost from farming practices. On this underpinning assumption we have further developed the LA conceptual model to characterize some land management units of rural spaces. Our aim is to articulate landscape management with farming systems. In this paper, after a short presentation of the LA conceptual model, we analyze the agricultural landscape features as example of elementary management unit. Finally, we discuss how the landscape management by farming systems can help to structure the interaction of agronomy with other disciplines, such as geography and landscape ecology