How many sustainable practices are needed to counteract the negative effects of multiple environmental global stressors on agricultural services

Poster and Abstract presented at the Advancing Soil Knowledge for a Sustainable Future:.the VII EUROSOIL Meeting 8-12 de septiembre de 2025, Sevilla

Agricultural ecosystem services such as food production and carbon sequestration are threatened by multiple environmental global change stressors including increasingly intense heat-waves and droughts caused by climate change, and the excessive presence of chemicals linked to anthropogenic activity. Sustainable management is expected to contribute to supporting a sustainable agriculture under the current scenario of climate change. However, a question which remains to be answered is how many sustainable management practices would be needed to counteract the multiple effects of global change stressors on agroservices? Here, we conducted a field experiment to investigate the role of sustainable management practices in shaping the responses of cereal agroecosystems to multiple environmental stressors. We developed a full-factorial designed semi-field experiment exposing two major cereal crops: wheat and maize, to an increasing number of stressors (combinations of warming, drought, excess of nutrient fertilization, high salinity and pH, and heavy metals) and sustainable practices (combinations of additions of organic fertilizer, soil from a natural soil, biochar, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, cover crop, intercropping with legumes). Combinations of one, two, three and four stressors and sustainable practices were established. We investigate the effects of these multiple treatments on the biodiversity and ecosystem services of agroecosystems including carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, fungal diversity, crop yield, and plant health. Preliminary results suggest that multiple management practices may be needed to handle the effects of environmental stress on agroecosystem services with consequences for the sustainability of agriculture under global change. Altogether, our results provide new insights on how global change factors affect soil biota and processes and how sustainable management can guide the future of sustainable agriculture under global change.

We acknowledge support from GRASS4FUN (Biodiversa+ 2022)/ MCIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ Unión Europea, and technical support from lab members of the BIOFUN Lab at IRNAS-CSIC.

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