Agroecology and beyond: enhancing ecosystem services provided by natural vegetation and inventing “service weeds”
Ioannis Gazoulis, Panagiotis Kanatas, Stavros Zannopoulos, Metaxia Kokkini, Vasiliki Kontogeorgou, Nikolaos Antonopoulos, Ilias Travlos
Abstract
Weeds are considered serious and troublesome pests for crops, and their management had always been at the core of plant protection (Oerke, 2006;Travlos et al., 2021).Despite the negative connotation of the term "weed," referring to plants that are spatially and temporally unwanted, weeds can sometimes have some positive impacts in agroecosystems due to their utility as food, feed, and their multiple ecosystem services (Blaix et al., 2018;Gaba et al., 2020).Numerous field studies have shown that biodiversity is a key factor in determining ecosystem services (Cardinale et al., 2012;Tilman et al., 2014;Visconti et al., 2018).Consequently, balancing biodiversity and productivity in agroecosystems is a challenging goal that can provide additional benefits due to multifunctionality (Mitchell et al., 2014).The aim of this opinion article is to present the ecosystem services potentially provided by (or related to) weeds in agroecosystems and discuss their quantification and further enhancement in an agroecological context.The keystone question is whether and how weeds could be managed and turned into "service weeds," similar to service crops, to contribute valuable ecosystem services.2 "Service weeds" and how to invent and promote them 2.1 Ecosystem services potentially provided by the weeds and their assessment Service crops, like cover crops, are cultivated in agroecosystems to provide non-marketed ecosystem services, diverging from food, fiber, and fuel production (Garcia et al., 2018).