J. Dumanski et al., RELEVANCE OF SCALE-DEPENDENT APPROACHES FOR INTEGRATING BIOPHYSICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC INFORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF AGROECOLOGICAL INDICATORS, Nutrient cycling in agroecosystems, 50(1-3), 1998, pp. 13-22
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.