Systems Approaches and Properties, and Agroecosystem Health

The emergence of the ecosystem health paradigm coincides with calls for more holistic, systems-based approaches to agricultural management. Ecosystem health incorporates medical analogies and procedural steps to evaluate and “treat” natural and controlled ecosystems, including agroecosystems. The conceptual basis for determining “health” in an agroecosystem context is still in the early stages, and hence, may benefit from other systems-based agricultural and ecological research approaches. Bodies of scholarship pertaining to ecological integrity, agroecology, agricultural systems and farming systems research, reviewed here, vary in terms of their application scale, dimension and potential utility in assessing the health of agroecosystems. Seven system properties are revealed among these approaches which lend themselves to a health interpretation. Five of these—stability, resilience, diversity/complexity, efficiency and equitability—are useful as a basis for defining agroecosystem health.