Biodiversity isn’t measured in tons: Making sense of nature in the context of sustainable agriculture

Iqbal Singh Bhalla , Philip A Loring

In this review, we articulate several important, but often overlooked concepts, trends, and perspectives in the biodiversity monitoring space, specifically in the context of transforming agriculture and the wider food system. We describe the common approaches to biodiversity monitoring — those focused on species, communities, functions, habitats, etc — and the methods and tools commonly used to track change. We then describe a set of fundamental ecological principles that are often overlooked by practitioners entering the agrobiodiversity space for the first time, particularly those with technical, industrial, and policy expertise in agriculture-adjacent fields who seek to incorporate biodiversity into their research and operations.
For these practitioners, we discuss the importance of abundance, the timelines along which population trends can be quantitatively established, the geographical scales at which ecological interactions play out, and the implications therein for anyone looking to monitor the effect of farm management practices. We attempt to describe the complexities that arise when navigating the intersection of ecological, agricultural, and social systems, highlighting the multiple sets of voices, values, and priorities that come into play in this space. From intergovernmental panels to individual farmers, the agrobiodiversity space holds a multitude of arenas of where decisions are made. We raise the question of “why, how, and for whom are we monitoring biodiversity?” to encourage practitioners new to this space to consider the implications of their approach. Finally, we discuss the conflicts and trade-offs that emerge in the intersection of productivity, profits, carbon and biodiversity, and explore the challenges in finding a balance between them in the transition toward a more sustainable form of agriculture.