RELEVANCE OF SCALE-DEPENDENT APPROACHES FOR INTEGRATING BIOPHYSICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC INFORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AGROECOLOGICAL INDICATORS

Issues of environmental sustainability, limits to growth and opportuni ty, introduction of new technology, and the economic and social costs of resource degradation have forced more proactive integration of biop hysical and socio-economic data. Natural resources management, includi ng soil, water and land quality, involve balancing the often conflicti ng objectives of food and fibre production under scenarios of increasi ng demand, while increasing economic efficiency and maintaining the qu ality of the environment. It involves integration of data from several disparate disciplines, scaling the data to make them compatible on in put, identifying strategic indicators, criteria and thresholds with wh ich to assess the state and performance of the system, and the applica tion of biophysical and economic optimisation models to examine the im pacts and trade-offs of alternate management options. However, some ba sic questions of scales and hierarchies still have to be resolved, e.g . how to ''scale-up'' the biophysical data to the level at which publi c policy is formulated without losing the integrity of the data. This paper examines these and related issues by discussing the theories and principles of spatial and temporal hierarchies and scales, and provid ing some examples of application.