Authors
Gorm Shackelford, Rodd Kelsey, William Sutherland, Christina Kennedy, Stephen Wood, Sasha Gennet, Daniel Karp, Claire Kremen, Nathaniel Seavy, Julie Jedlicka, Kelly Gravuer, Sara Kross, Deborah Bossio, Andrés Muñoz-Sáez, Deirdre LaHue, Kelly Garbach, Lawrence Ford, Mark Felice, Mark Reynolds, Devii Rao, Kathleen Boomer, Gretchen LeBuhn, Lynn Dicks
Publication date
2019
Journal
Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems
Volume
3
Pages
83
Publisher
Frontiers
Description
Agricultural management practices have impacts not only on crops and livestock, but also on soil, water, wildlife, and ecosystem services. Agricultural research provides evidence about these impacts, but it is unclear how this evidence should be used to make decisions. Two methods are widely used in decision making: evidence synthesis and decision analysis. However, a system of evidence-based decision making that integrates these two methods has not yet been established. Moreover, the standard methods of evidence synthesis have a narrow focus (e.g., the effects of one management practice), but the standard methods of decision analysis have a wide focus (e.g., the comparative effectiveness of multiple management practices). Thus, there is a mismatch between the outputs from evidence synthesis and the inputs that are needed for decision analysis. We show how evidence for a wide range of agricultural practices can be reviewed and summarized simultaneously (“subject-wide evidence synthesis”), and how this evidence can be assessed by experts and used for decision making (“multiple-criteria decision analysis”). We show how these methods could be used by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in California to select the best management practices for multiple ecosystem services in Mediterranean-type farmland and rangeland, based on a subject-wide evidence synthesis that was published by Conservation Evidence (www.conservationevidence.com). This method of “evidence-based decision analysis” could be used at different scales, from the local scale (farmers deciding which practices to adopt) to the national or international …
Total citations
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