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Abstract:
In the Anthropocene, the food production has brought benefits but also multidimensional problems for human and ecosystem health. Then, agroecosystems, understood as natural covers altered by humans to obtain its ecosystem services, must be analysed from a holistic socio-ecological perspective in which water plays a central role. To do this, there are several approaches that depending on the prevailing discipline could be grouped as socio-hydrological or hydro-social approaches. The challenge is their integration from interdisciplinary to transdisciplinary. This is to provide effective solutions for the present problems associated with water, being agriculture one of the main priorities.In this work we integrate Georgescu-Roegen's bio-economic view of “flows” and “funds” with the use of distributed ecohydrological modelling to assess the sustainability of agroecosystems in recent times through the estimation of socio-ecologic metabolic indicators (in terms of both energy and mass). We have used the region of Andalusia as a representative case of the intensification of industrial agriculture in Spain. To do this, we exploited a database of socio-ecological variables generated by the Agroecosystems History Laboratory -LHA of the Pablo de Olavide University (Seville, Spain). We then used a digital database of land covers from different time periods (from 1956 to 2016) which was harmonised with the LHA. Finally, we developed an ecohydrological distributed modelling to quantify the water and energy fluxes associated with agroecosystem biomass production. Thanks to such integration we can estimate integrated metabolic indicators such as: Energy Return of Investments - EROI, negentropic cost, water scarcity indices, among others.
