Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 154 (2012) 56–67 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment journa l h o me pa ge: www.elsevier.com/locate/agee Spatial complexity and ecosystem services in rural landscapes Pedro Laterra a,b,∗ , María E. Orúe a,b , Gisel C. Booman a,b a Unidad Integrada Balcarce: EEA Balcarce, Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria – Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, CC 276, 7620 Balcarce, Argentina b Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Argentina a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 3 August 2010 Received in revised form 29 April 2011 Accepted 11 May 2011 Available online 12 June 2011 Keywords: Ecosystem services Rural landscapes Landscape complexity Pampas Argentina Tradeoffs Complementarity Thresholds a b s t r a c t Despite general agreement on antagonist relationships between ecosystems capacity to simultaneously sustain the availability of regulating services and agricultural production, it is not clear how these tradeoffs operate in response to complexity loss at the rural landscapes level. Here we present a novel evaluation framework of ecosystem services (ES) and pose different response models to landscape com- plexity. Therefore, we tested the hypothesis that complementarities among different ES types increase and the strength of their apparent tradeoffs diminishes with the spatial complexity of the rural land- scapes, using a one million has basin of the Argentine pampas as study case. According to correlation and principal component analysis, main ES tradeoffs among ES availability observed at two spatial scales were represented by crop production vs. the other evaluated ES types (OES), and in contrast with our pre- diction, their strength was not higher for the fine- than for the coarse-scale (relatively large and internally complex observation units). Landscape composition and configuration indices showed a complementary capacity to explain spatial variation in OES, but combinations of configuration indices showed a higher explanatory value than composition ones. Widely accepted tradeoffs among ecosystem services at local levels, not only were able to explain their antagonistic but also their synergistic availability at intermedi- ate levels of conversion of managed grasslands to croplands, depending on the evaluation scale. Despite intermediate complexity hypothesis was only partly supported by our results, these offer novel evidences about emergent responses in the form of nonlinearities and thresholds of total ES in relation to landscape complexity, which deserve further attention because of their relevance for land use planning. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In contrast with a farming-centered point of view which dom- inates the analysis of agricultural landscapes, rural landscapes provide a wider knowledge-action arena where a mixed array of social actors (scientists included) meet to cooperate and/or to compete for production, conservation and recreation objectives, as well as for scientific understanding and management decisions. Therefore, rural landscapes actors must cope with difficulties in predicting system properties from their many and interacting land- scape components, that is to say, they must cope with functional and spatial complexity of rural landscapes. Spatial complexity of rural landscapes results from the dynamic interaction between the spatial distribution of biophysical cues and variable human actions. While simplification of rural landscapes (e.g. conversion of managed grasslands to croplands) favors the ∗ Corresponding author at: Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, CC 276, 7620 Balcarce, Argentina. Tel.: +54 2266 439100; fax: +54 2266 439101. E-mail address: platerra@balcarce.inta.gov.ar (P. Laterra). channeling of solar and subsidized energy and ultimately rises the agricultural production and economic profitability, the associated biodiversity loss and the impairment of different ecosystem pro- cesses can negatively affect the agricultural sustainability (Dauber et al., 2003; Honnay et al., 2003; Rodríguez et al., 2006; Dalgaard et al., 2007; Ryszkowski and Karg, 2007) as well as the avail- ability of other ecosystem services (Bennett and Balvanera, 2007; Persson et al., 2010). Here we consider ecosystem services (short for ecosystem goods and services) as those benefits from ecosystem functioning available to human individuals and society; hereafter, ES) (Boyd and Banzhaf, 2007; Wallace, 2007). Gains in productivity and predictability of agricultural produc- tion by the conversion of “natural” landscape elements and loss of ecosystem services (ES) are a source of stakeholders’ conflicts. Notwithstanding a general agreement exists about tradeoff influ- ences on the ecosystem capacity to sustain regulating ecosystem services while facing their agricultural conversion (MA, 2005), it is not clear how these tradeoffs operate in response to complexity loss at the rural landscapes level. In particular, while fixed land cover-ES relationships are frequently assumed in tradeoff analysis of ecosystem services (Guo et al., 2003; Viglizzo and Frank, 2006), other authors advocate for the existence of complementarity 0167-8809/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.agee.2011.05.013