Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services in Agroecosystems K Garbach, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA JC Milder, Rainforest Alliance, New York, NY, USA M Montenegro and DS Karp, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA FAJ DeClerck, Bioversity International, Maccarese, Rome, Italy r 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Glossary Agroecology The application of ecological concepts and principles to the design and management of sustainable agroecosystems. Agroecosystems Agricultural ecosystems including biophysical and human components and their interactions. Biodiversity The variation of life in all forms from genes, to species, to communities, to whole ecosystems. Ecosystem service providers Organisms, guilds, and ecological communities that are biological mediators of ecosystem services, providing services through their functions and interactions. Ecosystem services Functions of ecosystems – including agroecosystems – that are useful to humans or support human well-being: (1) provisioning services include the production of food, fuel, fiber, and other harvestable goods; (2) regulating services include climate regulation, flood control, disease control, waste decomposition, and water quality regulation; (3) supporting services include the foundational processes necessary for production of other services, including soil formation, nutrient cycling, and photosynthesis (primary production); and (4) cultural services provide recreational, esthetic, spiritual, and other nonmaterial benefits. Human well-being A context- and situation-dependent state that comprises basic material for a good life, freedom and choice, health, good social relations, and security. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment An international synthesis released in 2005, created by more than 1000 of the world's leading scientists, that analyzed the state of the Earth's ecosystems. Payment for ecosystem services Market-based instruments used to channel investment in ecosystem services. Resilience The capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and retain structure and function; this includes the human capacity to anticipate and plan for the future (e.g., in managing agricultural systems). Scale Geographical extent; relevant scales for agroecosystems often include units commonly used in management and decision making, such as field (local and on-farm cultivated area), farm (including cultivated and noncultivated areas), landscape, regional, and global. Introduction Historically, agricultural systems have been managed, above all, for the production of food and fiber; however, agricultural landscapes can provide a wide range of goods and services to society. ‘Ecosystem services’ are those functions of ecosystems – including agroecosystems – that are useful to humans or support human well-being (Daily, 1997; Kremen, 2005). The ecosystem services concept is remarkably longstanding. Mooney and Ehrlich (1997) noted that in approximately 400 BC, Plato observed how forests provided important services to Attica and forest loss resulted in drying springs and soil ero- sion. Plato's work highlights that people have been aware of these critical services long before the dawn of industrial agriculture (Rapidel et al., 2011). In the past two decades, work at the interface of ecology and economics to characterize, value, and manage ecosystem services has supported a paradigm shift in how society thinks about ecosystems and human relationships to them. As both major providers and major beneficiaries of ecosystem services, agricultural landscapes and the people within them are at the center of this shift. Growing calls for agriculture landscapes to be managed as ‘multifunctional’ systems create new mandates, as well as opportunities, to maintain and enhance ecosystem services as part of productive agroecosystems. Work on multifunctional ecosystems draws on the Millen- nium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) and other recent evalu- ations of ecosystem services (e.g., The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity and The Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides a globally recognized classification that emphasizes relationships between ecosystem services and human well- being and describes four types of services (The authors draw on the classification of ecosystems services used in Millennium Ecosystem Assessment throughout the article (MEA, 2005), recognizing that more recent classifications have minimized or eliminated supporting services in favor of specific, oper- ational descriptions designed for environmental accounting (Haines-Young and Potschin, 2012) and economic valuation (TEEB, 2010)). Provisioning services include the production of food, fuel, fiber, and other harvestable goods. Regulating services include climate regulation, flood control, disease control, waste decomposition, and water quality regulation. Supporting services include the foundational processes neces- sary for production of other services, including soil formation, nutrient cycling, and photosynthesis (primary production). Cultural services provide recreational, esthetic, spiritual, and other nonmaterial benefits. Most classifications, despite their variations, consider interdependence between ecosystem ser- vices and human well-being as well as variation in ecosystem Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Volume 2 doi:10.1016/B978-0-444-52512-3.00013-9 21