Agrosystem Services: An Additional Terminology to Better Understand Ecosystem Services Delivered by Agriculture

To discriminate between the contributions of ecosystems and the human subsidies to agricultural systems,
we propose using an additional terminology to bring clarification into the controversial discussion about i)
ecosystems versus agrosystems and ii) ecosystem services versus agrosystem services. A literature review
revealed that with the exception of some very recent publications, this has not yet been sufficiently
reflected, neither within the scientific nor in the policy discussion. The question remains whether to spoil
the discussion with new terms again and again. We reason that it makes sense to underpin the case-specific
share of agricultural inputs to the supply of agroecosystem services and to add “agro” to the terminology. We
conclude, that there is a need to promote the new terminology of agrosystem services and to strengthen the
use of the already established term agroecosystem services within this context.
To emphasise the production patterns behind the multiple benefits agricultural systems provide to humans
(commodity and non-commodity outputs) and to guarantee a reasonable weighting of related externalities
in policy processes, we suggest to introduce the term agrosystem services into the discussion on ecosystem
services. Agrosystem services in this context describe the anthropogenic share of agroecosystem services’
generation. Agroecosystem services include multiple provisioning, regulating and cultural services from
agricultural ecosystems. The inclusion of agrosystem services might accommodate the ecology-based
ecosystem services concept to the specificity of managed agricultural ecosystems and therefore could be
better implemented by mostly economy-driven agricultural production systems and agricultural policy.