Impact of production intensity on the ability of the agricultural landscape to generate ecosystem services: an example from Sweden

Abstract This paper identifies a number of essential ecosystem services, and estimates their generation by the Swedish agricultural landscape under different production intensities. This is exemplified with data from a low-intensity period (1950s) and a high-intensity one (1990s). The services are described in qualitative and, to the extent possible, quantitative terms, and the ecological functions that support these services are identified. About 20% of Swedish agricultural land has been removed from production during the past 40 years. Production has been strongly intensified with respect to external inputs, and specialized regionally. Local landscape mosaics have been substantially altered, which resulted in a decreased ability of agricultural landscapes to support natural ecosystem components and processes. We argue that all of these changes affect the ability of the landscape to generate ecosystem services. Local, ecological ‘goods and services’ have largely been replaced by fossil fuel driven technology and the regulation of the system is now driven much more by external factors. However, there is no notable change in the system's ability to assimilate solar energy, measured by net primary production (NPP) and corrected for the cost of production (external inputs considered as foregone NPP). Most of the measures we derive indicate a loss of ecosystem services from the Swedish agricultural landscape. This is tantamount to losing an important form of ‘local ecological insurance’, and could lead to serious problems in a future with lower access to external resources, or with an altered energy policy.