Agronomy for Sustainable Development - Featured article: The ESSU concept for designing, modeling and auditing ecosystem service provision in intercropping and agroforestry systems. A review
This paper is a response to Duru et al. (Agron Sustain Dev 35:1259-1281, 2015) who stressed that a tool was missing for studying and improving the performance of cropping systems in the transition to highly diversified agriculture. The authors propose a new concept named ESSU (Ecosystem Services functional Spatial Unit) which allows the representation of an entire diversified agroecosystem by the repetition of the spatial unit that provides the same sets of targeted ecosystem services as the agroecosystem it represents. It opens new theoretical and practical research avenues for designing, evaluating or modeling diversified agroecosystems.