Given global change (e.g. climate, land use), the functioning of ecosystems and the services they can supply have become a focal area of interest within ecology and need to be understood and investigated at different levels of biological integration and complexity and across various spatial and temporal scales. Research within PE&RC allows for such a cross-scale approach as it covers scales from gene to ecosystem, from individual to landscape and from evolutionary to real time. Experimental and modelling research approaches are applied to both natural and agricultural systems.
Download research PE&RC chairs here
PE&RC’s mission:
Understanding the functioning of (agro)-ecosystems to design and enable the development of sustainable and multifunctional production and land use systems
This mission can be viewed from a local, regional and global perspective, considering socio-economic and biophysical objectives and constraints. The actual research in PE&RC ranges from aspects of intensive agricultural production systems (e.g., glasshouses) to extensive (semi-)natural production systems (e.g. agro-forests and savannas). Production refers to products as well as services (e.g. recreation, biodiversity).
To understand these systems, they need to be investigated at various spatial and temporal scales and at different levels of biological integration and complexity. This brings forward upcoming challenges in the PE&RC research being:
Being a collaborative research network, the prime task of PE&RC is facilitating and stimulating the scientific research process. Like everywhere in the Netherlands academic research is a bottom-up activity, which is largely the result of the activities of the individual chair groups and its staff members. However, whereas individual chairs are primarily responsible for their research, PE&RC stimulates strategic alliances for interdisciplinary research among participating groups and thus supports and strengthens a more coherent overall research network.
Since 2000 amalgamation of production ecology and resource conservation has been a focal point in PE&RC, focusing on sustainable development and a multifunctional view of production within the rural landscape. It takes into account social-cultural and economic aspects and the realization that decisions on sustainable land use, production and conservation are often taken at the management levels of field and farms. The natural sciences are the corner stone of (agro-)ecosystem research in PE&RC. Communication and collaboration with social sciences are however, required to adjust a conceptual framework on sustainable and multifunctional land use systems.