Implications of land management practices on selected ecosystem services in the agricultural landscapes of Ethiopia: a review

ABSTRACT

Human-induced land degradation and impairment of ecosystem services (ES) are among the serious problems in Ethiopia due to excessive pressure on land and water resources. Thus, various land management (LM) practices have been done to enhance ES and environmental sustainability. However, very little is known about the influence of efficacious LM practices on multiple ES. This study aims at assessing the implication of LM practices on crop yield, soil carbon stock, soil fertility, soil moisture, runoff, soil loss, nutrient loss, and cultural/societal services. A systematic review and synthesis methods were employed. Predefined criteria were used to screen relevant articles; thereby, 572 observations from 94 studies were extracted and synthesized. The results showed that agronomic practices increased grain yields, soil carbon stock, soil fertility, and soil moisture on average by 28, 29, 43 and 14%, respectively. Biological practices regulated runoff, soil loss, and nutrient loss on average by 46, 59 and 94%, respectively. Overall, LM practices were efficacious to enhance delivery of ES bundles but soil bund and fanyaa juu reduced the grain yield on average by 24 and 22%, respectively. This indicates that there are trade-offs between provisioning and other services like regulating, supporting and cultural under physical structures. However, landscape-level collective impact of different LM practices exhibited without any ES trade-offs. The integration of properly designed physical structures with agronomic and biological practices is imperative to enhance ES and balance the trade-offs in the agricultural landscapes. Further, it is important to find out alternative combinations of agricultural LM practices and evaluate for ES delivery.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecosystems
• ecosystem services
• land management
• grain yield
• trade-offs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social and Environmental Trade-offs in African Agriculture (SENTINEL) of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF)-UK through the regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), Haramaya University and EIAR [grant number RU/2019/GTA/DRG/042].