Las relaciones ecológicas: un aspecto central en el rediseño de agroecosistemas sustentables, a partir de la Agroecología

Abstract

Agroecology emerges as a new paradigm of the agricultural sciences to generate knowledge for the evaluation, design and management of sustainable agroecosystems. One of the biggest challenges today is to reduce or eliminate the use of inputs (expensive and dangerous). This requires changes in the design and management of agroecosystems in order to strengthen the ecological processes that the present biodiversity provides. These ecological services are the product of many interactions between the different components of the cultivated and spontaneous biodiversity in agroecosystems. Manipulating this biodiversity successfully in order to optimize positive interactions and reduce negative ones requires knowledge of ecology to understand the functioning of agroecosystems as complex systems. This chapter addresses the main knowledge to be taken into account and its usefulness is analyzed with an example in Argentinean pampean systems.