A journal of the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE)
Agronomy for Sustainable Development is an international journal with the objective to publish literature on the interface with agronomy, cropping and farming system research with ecological, genetic, environmental, economic or social sciences.
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This study is a comprehensive global meta-analysis assessing the contribution of fertilization (with a wide set of nutrients) to the nutritional quality of food crops, an aspect little studied so far, compared to yield. It shows that fertilizer application improves crop yield and nutritional quality by varying degrees, depending on nutrient and crop species, with vegetables being the most responsive. It paves the way towards a quantitative understanding of nutrient management programs and responsible plant nutrition solutions that foster the sustainable production of nutritious and healthy crops for human consumption
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.
