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Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
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Challenges for grassland science: managing research priorities
G. Lemaire a, R. Wilkins b, J. Hodgson c,*
a
INRA, Unite d’Ecophysiologie des Plantes Fourragères, 86600 Lusignan, France
b
University of Plymouth, Seale-Hayne, Newton Abbot TQ12 6NQ, UK
c
Institute of Natural Resources, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Received 2 August 2004; received in revised form 12 January 2005; accepted 13 January 2005
Abstract
Production-oriented research in the second half of the 20th century made impressive contributions to technical developments
which helped to meet the food requirements of an expanding world population. These developments involved increasing
specialisation in land use and in food production techniques, with progressive separation between food crop production and
animal production. It is now recognised that these developments have contributed to serious long-term effects on the stability of
the world’s land and water resources, and on environmental hazards. Grasslands are particularly important in this spectrum of
issues, in view of their dominant contribution to land use in many parts of the world, and because they occupy the nexus between
the production functions and the environmental impacts of land use strategy, with implications for resource stability, biodiversity
and global change. Also, they are an essential component of integrated land use systems which incorporate flexible combinations
of cropping, pasture and forestry.
This paper argues the need for a re-appraisal of prioritisation and funding in research on issues of land use strategy in general,
and on issues of integrated land use and grassland management in particular. There is a need to provide a stronger base for
genuine inter-disciplinary research, with the emphasis on integrated land use programmes and effective coordination of
production and conservation oriented objectives, and greater emphasis on a coordinated programme of large-scale, long-term,
integrated land use research projects on a national or, preferably, a regional basis. Improved linkages between national and
international research programmes, and closer coordination of interests between the professional bodies representing particular
land use interests, are likely to be required for the effective execution and delivery of such programmes. Achievement of these
objectives will require a re-evaluation of conventional research and tertiary education priorities, to encourage both a broader
vision and a more informed and flexible attitude to land use issues.
# 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Grassland science; Research priorities; Tertiary education; Agro-ecology; Environment
1. Introduction
* Corresponding author. Tel.: +64 6 356 9099;
fax: +64 6 350 5659.
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Hodgson).
The ‘‘grassland’’ biome potentially covers 36% of
the earth’s surface (Shantz, 1954), approximately
equivalent to the forest area and the area of arable
0167-8809/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.agee.2005.01.003
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G. Lemaire et al. / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
cultivation. It is important for research objectives to
consider two types of grasslands: (i) the climatically
determined grasslands in areas where water availability is not enough to support forests (Lauenroth,
1979), and (ii) the anthropogenically determined
grasslands located in most of the temperate regions
where the potential vegetation is forest and where
herbaceous vegetation is maintained by domestic
herbivore exploitation. Within this second type of
grassland it is possible to distinguish long-term
naturalized grasslands from cultivated grasslands in
cropping areas. All these grasslands play an important
role in the dynamics of atmosphere, hydrosphere and
continental surface interactions driving global
changes and environmental hazards, or adjusting to
them. Grasslands therefore play a vital role in the
structure and functioning of the overall landscape.
They also contribute to effects on agronomic, social,
environmental and economic activities at national,
regional and catchment scales.
This list of attributes and processes represents a
major change in emphasis in grassland science, from a
specific focus on food production through most of the
20th century to a much broader concept of resource
management. Developments in agricultural technology in the second half of the 20th century resulted in
impressive improvements in the technical efficiency of
food production in specific sectors, but also contributed to serious declines in the stability of the
world’s land, water and environmental resources
(Dahlberg, 1979; van der Meer and van der Putten,
1995). At the same time, there has been much less
positive impact on the productivity of small-scale
mixed farming systems in developing countries
(Serageldin, 2001). The objective of this paper is to
show that the broader aspects of grassland science are
not well served by conventional research and teaching
policies, and to suggest ways in which these might be
adjusted to make more effective use of national and
international research capability.
2. Research priorities
Grassland ecosystems are composed of inseparable
and interactive components: (i) a vegetation community or communities together with a varied population
of herbivores, (ii) the physical and chemical compo-
nents of the soil, and (iii) a diverse soil microbial
community and micro-fauna. They are subjected to
herbivory (above and below ground) and mineral
recycling through herbivore ingestion and excretion or
through additions of fertilizers and manures. Many
such systems contain legumes which contribute to
cycling of N by biologically fixing N2. These
ecosystems are important for the quality of atmosphere and hydrosphere, for biodiversity, and as a
major part of the ecology of the landscape. They can
no longer be considered only as a tool for the
production of animal products to meet the food
demands of the human population. Grassland ecosystems have to be managed with multi-purpose
objectives corresponding to the different functions
assigned to grassland: environment, biodiversity,
landscape ecology, and agricultural production with
socio-economic outputs (Dahlberg, 1979, 1986).
In most of the European countries large land areas
were formerly used in mixed farming systems where
grasslands and crops interacted intimately, either
spatially by exchanges of foods for animals and organic
matter returns, or temporally through ley-crops rotations. Such a system provided sustainable farming in
agronomic terms by ensuring long-term soil quality
preservation, and also in economic terms by ensuring
diversification of incomes for farmers. From the 1930s
to the 1970s the importance of treating grasslands as
ecosystems (in terms of both research strategy and
management practice) was a constant theme in the
writings of research leaders (Stapledon, 1943; Davies,
1952; McMeeken, 1952; Levy, 1970; Spedding, 1975),
together with an awareness of the stabilising influence of
grasslands in mixed land use systems (Davies, 1952).
The requirement to increase food production, because of
increasing world population and political instability,
much increased the emphasis on production from
grasslands (Wahlen, 1952; Whyte, 1960), and the
increased use of fertilisers and technical chemicals
associated in some areas with the expansion of silage
maize cultivation reduced the importance of grassland
in mixed farming systems. Emphasis on technical
efficiency led to increasing specialisation in research
and production, with spectacular effects on the
productivity of grassland systems (Humphreys, 1997),
but resulted in the progressive de-coupling of research
on alternative or complementary land uses, on the
production and conservation elements of grassland use,
G. Lemaire et al. / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
and even of soil, plant and animal research in grassland
studies (Wilkins, 2000). The resulting simplification and
intensification of agricultural practice gave rise to
problems of pollution, waste disposal and reduced
biodiversity in the countryside. These are now major
elements of concern in land use research.
In large parts of Europe intensification of cropping
and dairy systems associated with the high prices for
products has led to a specialisation of farms with the
most fertile cultivated lands devoted to cereal
cropping, and less fertile regions with smaller farm
units devoted to intensive animal production. Each of
these two systems now faces serious environmental
problems, and this specialisation of land use at
landscape level cannot be maintained. Because the
specialisation of farming itself may be inescapable,
new strategies of mixed land use by association of
farm units specialised, respectively, in crop and animal
production have to be promoted at landscape and
regional levels in order to maintain a patchwork of
cropping and grassland systems which contribute to a
more sustainable agriculture. So new scientific
questions emerge, concerning: (i) roles for grassland
at landscape level for ecological, agronomic and
environmental objectives, (ii) definition of types of
grassland vegetation and management systems for
optimising these roles, and (iii) the appropriate sitting
of grasslands within landscapes or catchments. These
questions have never been addressed in the past, where
research studies were concentrated upon either the
field or the farm, but not at the landscape or territory
level.
The concept of multifunctionality of agriculture
provides a new framework for all disciplines in the
sector of grassland research (Hervieu, 2002). Scientific objectives, methods of investigation and models
have to be reconsidered with the aim of producing an
integrative approach at a range of scales (field plot,
farm, landscape, territory, etc.) where the different
functions can be evaluated. The multiple functions of
grassland also demand a genuinely inter-disciplinary
approach to research. To achieve such objectives it is
necessary to produce integrated knowledge, new
concepts and new tools at the different levels of
organisation of grassland agro-ecosystems: (i) the
field plot where the basic biogeochemical processes
are acting, (ii) the farming system where coherent
management procedures are combined, (iii) the
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landscape where multifunctionality, interaction
between different land uses and overall impact can
be evaluated, and (iv) the region/nation state where
socio-economic and political factors become important. Ormerod et al. (2003) emphasise the important
role of ecologists in dealing with major agroenvironmental questions, but the issues are much
broader than this.
2.1. The role of grassland for regulating
biogeochemical cycles, environmental fluxes and
biodiversity at local scale
The world’s grasslands play an important role in
regulation of the C cycle by storing ca. 15% of the
global organic C (Tate and Ross, 1997). The mean
annual primary production of grassland is similar to
that of forest (Körner, 1999), and given that more than
two thirds of the annual grassland biomass production
is allocated to below ground structures, accumulation
of deep soil organic matter layers makes an important
contribution to C sequestration in most grassland
ecosystems (Körner, 2002). The role of grassland in
regulating the N cycle is more complex because
grazing animals recover, on average, only 7% of the N
supply (Grignani and Laidlaw, 2002). Nitrogen fluxes
in grassland systems contribute directly to three
environmental concerns: nitrate leaching, volatilization of ammonia, and nitrous oxide emissions.
Research to relate operational management decisions
in grassland systems directly to their consequences to
environmental fluxes have produced new methods and
new concepts (Jarvis, 1999), but have not yet
permitted an integrated view of the dynamics of the
grassland ecosystem because: (i) the individual fluxes
(nitrate leaching, N2O and NH3 emission, CO2
sequestration or emission, etc.) too often have been
studied separately despite their great interdependency,
and (ii) the characteristic turn-over times of the
different processes involved within the system are not
well known despite recent advances in stable isotope
methodologies (Murphy et al., 2003). Most of these
fluxes are related to soil organic matter (SOM)
dynamics through soil microbial activities which
couple the different processes. Moreover, the residence times of C and N within the different chemical
and physical compartments of SOM are relatively
long, varying from 10 to more than 100 years
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(Balesdent and Mariotti, 1996). In consequence,
some of the environmental outputs observed today
could be the delayed consequences of changes in land
use and management that occurred several years or
decades ago. Similarly, changes in land use and
management systems for restoring environment and
biodiversity require more precise information on the
time responses of the whole system: vegetation,
animal, soil and microbial communities. The key
scientific knowledge required is a functional and
biochemical identification of the different fractions
of the soil organic matter. To understand the process
of SOM stabilisation, it is necessary to characterise
the main biochemical compounds interacting with the
soil matrix, and how C and N are protected from
microbial activities. Questions on the storage of C in
grassland soils and the equilibrium between C
sequestration and C mineralisation are of high
relevance for global change issues (Soussana et al.,
2004). It is difficult to compare CO2 links in grassland
and forest biomes, because there is little information
on the long-term dynamics of SOM in grasslands.
Modelling is the only tool for predicting long-term
evolution of C in soils, but for a realistic and
mechanistic representation of the dynamics of the
SOM system it is necessary to invest more deeply in
characterising the different functional compartments
by their molecular signature (Poirier et al., 2000;
Rumpel et al., 2004). There is also little information
on C sequestration in deep soil horizons. The great
majority of studies concern only the storage of N
within the 0–30 cm soil layer, but, as demonstrated by
Rumpel et al. (2002), 50% of C can be stored within
deeper horizons with a higher residence time than for
C stored in upper layers where microbial activity is
high. This demonstrates that our knowledge on SOM
and C–N cycles in grassland soil is fragmented. Due
to the importance of grasslands as one of the largest
biomes on the planet, increase in basic knowledge on
SOM long-term dynamics must be placed at a high
priority for grassland science.
Predicting plant species and community responses
to grazing management is difficult (Herben and
Huber-Sannwald, 2002). Diversity of grassland
vegetation has long been described in terms of species
number and botanical composition. Species-specific
differences in life cycle phenology and growth form
explain a part of this diversity (Sackville-Hamilton
and Harper, 1989). More recently attempts have been
made to explain diversity of grassland vegetation by
functional traits (Lavorel and Garnier, 2002), either at
leaf level or at root level. The advantage of such a
functional approach in comparison to the botanical
approach is to link vegetation diversity to the different
functions the plants have to play within the ecosystem:
primary production, litter quality and decomposition,
competition for light and for soil resources, and
interactions with herbivores. So different species,
independent of their position within the phylogeny,
may have similar functional traits either in terms of
ecosystem effects or in terms of response to change,
allowing them to be re-arranged in similar functional
groups. The interactions between plants and soil
micro-organisms may critically affect plant growth,
plant–plant interactions and potentially plant community composition and structure (Clay, 1990). In
turn, changes in plant community composition could
affect microbial communities and then the soil organic
matter dynamics with more or less long-term feed
back (McGaig et al., 1999). So the analysis of
vegetation dynamics in term of functional groups
appears to be a very powerful tool for linking changes
in vegetation with biogeochemical cycles and vice
versa, and also for studying effects of herbivore
behaviour on vegetation dynamics and vice versa.
Spatial variations in patterns of grazing and excretion,
and spatio-temporal changes in abiotic and biotic
environments, affect the spatial pattern and structure
of vegetation (Watkinson and Ormerod, 2001; Garcia
et al., in press). So studies in vegetation dynamics need
to include information on temporal and spatial
heterogeneity which is a dynamic component of the
grazing ecosystem.For all these reasons, it appears
necessary to develop integrated inter-disciplinary
programmes based on networks of long-term experiments to complement and extend process-based
research. With this approach:
a wide range of grassland ecosystems (climate, soil,
vegetation) would be investigated;
contrasting managements would be applied as
perturbations for long-term observation of divergent evolutionary trajectories;
the time course for evolution of relevant state
variables for vegetation, soil and populations of
organisms would be monitored;
G. Lemaire et al. / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
plant–herbivore interactions and their consequences
to biogeochemical cycles and vegetation dynamics
would be analysed;
environmental fluxes from and to the atmosphere
and to the hydrosphere would be regularly
estimated and related to changes in state variables
in relation to global changes;
key processes and interactions between compartments of the systems would be evaluated.
The outcome of such research should be common
integrated databases and theoretical frameworks to
explain the long-term evolution of grassland systems
subjected to contrasted management programmes. A
modelling approach would be necessary for integrating information and knowledge gained from this
research. This would underpin scenario simulations to
evaluate environmental and agricultural issues in
terms of risks or benefits resulting from a range of
management systems. The scientific and technological
outcomes will be crucial in informing local, national
and international policy makers on the role, impact
and management of grassland systems for sustainable
land use.
2.2. Grassland at farm and landscape scale:
environmental and ecological analysis and socioeconomic perspectives
The approach discussed above is only relevant at
the very local scale from 10 1 to 104 m2 where
interactions between vegetation, soil, micro-organisms, and micro-fauna occur under the constraints
imposed by grazing animals. Such an approach is built
on process-based research and it cannot take into
account all the diversity of management programmes
that grassland areas are subjected to. This ‘‘What
if. . .’’ approach is not sufficient for conceiving and
evaluating new management programmes dealing
with environment, biodiversity and socio-economic
issues. It is necessary to complement this kind of
research by developing an integrated network at the
level of both animal production systems and mixed
grazing and cropping systems to investigate the role of
different land-management programmes in resource
conservation and agricultural production. The question we have to ask at this level of investigation is
‘‘What is necessary for. . .?’’ To answer this question
103
for a series of different case studies requires the
creation of new generic methodologies for conceiving
and evaluating new agro-ecosystems which can satisfy
multiple objectives. The achievement of compromise
between the different goals (animal production, socioeconomic benefits, environmental risk, biodiversity
conservation or other public goods like amenity of
landscape) depends on the different stakeholders and
social groups involved, and several scenarios have to
be investigated to provide decision support to policy
makers. This suggests the need for a modelling
approach for the simulation and evaluation of ‘‘virtual
systems’’ in order to prospect a large spectrum of
possibilities and to select optimum compromises
between contradictory objectives.
At this level of investigation grasslands have to be
considered as components of a land use system. This
may be a pure grassland area like the Savanna in
Africa, the Pampa and Campo in South America or the
Steppe in Asia, but in most other areas in the world
grassland is only a part of the land cover at the scale of
landscape, and this ecosystem interacts spatially or
temporally either with forest or shrub vegetation or
with cropping areas. In these situations landscapes
have to be explicitly described as a mosaic of soil
cover with spatially distributed management programmes. The functioning of such a territorial entity
can be analysed through:
the integrated environmental fluxes at the boundaries of the system to the atmosphere and hydrosphere taking into account the spatial interactions
between the different agro-ecosystems;
biodiversity at different levels of organisation
within the territory and for different populations
or communities of plants, insects, birds and
mammals (Wallis De Vries, 2002);
the landscape value from a cultural and heritage
point of view (Mormont, 2002).
The intensification of agriculture of Northwest
Europe with the disappearance of most of the grasslands from cereal production regions was accompanied by the extinction of large number of plants,
insects, birds and micro-mammals (Robinson and
Sutherland, 2002). Grasslands represent an important habitat and a source of food for several protected bird species (Bretagnolle and Inchausti, in
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press; Inchausti and Bretagnolle, 2005). Such a role
of grassland in biodiversity conservation can only be
analysed at landscape level, and must necessarily
take into account the socio-economic forces which
determine the land use system and its evolution.
Such an integrated and multidisciplinary approach
should help to define some options in land use and
management systems to be promoted at regional scale
for optimising the multifunctionality of agriculture.
But this approach does not take into account the
potential for socio-economic resistance to change,
which needs to be identified in order to allow some
evolution in land use and management systems in the
direction of a more sustainable agriculture and rural
economy. For this purpose the landscape has to be
considered as an assembly of farmers and farm units
which respond individually to their own socioeconomic constraints in relation to their own goals.
Multifunctionality of agriculture has to meet human
demands for rural development, and socio-economic
researchers have to identify and to make explicit the
contradictions between the socio-economic goals of
farmers and the environmental or ecological goals of
the other components of society. The whole process
would be aided by progress in methodology for putting
a financial value on the environmental and social
aspects of multifunctionality. This would facilitate the
identification of optimised land use and management
systems, targeting policy for sustainable agriculture,
and determination of the role of grassland in such an
objective.
3. Structure and funding of research
From the 1970s onwards there has been increasing
concern about the impact of exploitative technology
on the stability of natural resources and the sustainability of land use practices, and growing awareness of
the need to balance aspects of technical and financial
efficiency with concepts of resource conservation and
socio-economic awareness (Dahlberg, 1979). At the
same time, however, substantial changes have taken
place in the structuring and funding of national and
international research programmes, with increasing
emphasis on market-led research and on the customer/
contractor principle in research funding (Her
Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1971). This emphasis
has resulted in research programmes focussed
increasingly on commercial advantage rather than
public good (Alston et al., 1999) and in disciplineoriented rather than generic research (e.g. Maplestone
and Blundell, 1995). The impact of these effects on
research capability has been exacerbated by declines
in national funding for agricultural research (Alston
et al., 1999).
In this scenario, the increased importance of
multifunctionality of grassland and the continuing
dominance of grassland and grassland-based farming
in many areas of the world creates new challenges to
the development of optimal research structures and
funding arrangements. Grassland research has for
many years not fitted easily into research structures
that have often had major divisions between soils,
plants and animal interests. The situation is now much
more complex, with the critical role of grassland for
recreation, landscape, biodiversity and the quality of
the soil, water and the atmosphere being increasingly
emphasised in addition to its role in producing meat,
milk and fibre and in sustaining rural economies.
These interests are often wider than those of individual
government Departments, Research Councils and
Institutes. In addition, as noted earlier, key issues
operate at different scales and responses may take
decades for full manifestation. This produces major
challenges for evolving and developing effective
research programmes. In the UK, for instance,
research on grassland, land use and rural communities
is at the interface of the interests and responsibilities of
the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research
Council (BBSRC), the Natural Environment Research
Council (NERC) and the Economics and Social
Research Council (ESRC), with each of these
Research Councils having a high level of autonomy.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs (Defra) was formed in 2001, with responsibilities in England and Wales across the areas of major
concern for grassland and land use. A high proportion
of the funding from both the Research Councils and
Defra is, however, dispersed in research contracts of
only 3-years duration. The time-scale required for key
projects, such as those identified previously, will often
be at least 10 years, more akin to that for ecological
research, rather than for more controlled agricultural
research or the desk studies and surveys common in
social science research.
G. Lemaire et al. / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
Pragmatically, the requirements for effective grassland research for the future will not drive changes in
overall national research structures, and we must
consider how the requirements can best be met with
existing structures. In theory the requirements for
research in the grassland area should be better satisfied
where responsibility fits within one structure (e.g.
Defra) than where the interests span a number of
Departments or Research Councils. In the UK in 2001 a
new collaborative programme entitled Rural Economy
and Land Use (RELU) was announced which involved
collaboration between BBSRC, NERC, ESRC and
Defra, together with the Scottish executive, to provide
funds for facilitating contacts and capacity building in
interface areas, in addition to funding interdisciplinary
projects (http://www.escr.ac.uk/relu/). The programme
has strong central management. The initiative is to be
commended, but if there is no continuing structure to
focus on these interface areas, there is a serious risk that
opportunities will not be taken or that the response to a
need will be unduly delayed. Ideally, there should be
some continuing structure controlling funds allocated
by individual Research Councils and charged with the
development of integrated programmes. Also, there
must be realisation that for full benefits to accrue, some
projects will need to have secure funding for at least a
decade.
The wider issues may be taken up more readily in
countries where there is a broad-based National
Science Council, or equivalent body, rather than more
autonomous, but sectoral, Research Councils. The
Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique in
France, and the Foundation for Research, Science
and Technology in New Zealand, are examples of
government research agencies which cover the
research capability necessary for an integrated
interdisciplinary approach to the role and impact of
grasslands in land use and management programmes.
However, despite this apparent advantage, attempts to
initiate effective interdisciplinary research programmes in these areas across structural boundaries
have had limited success (e.g. Lancashire, 2001).
This suggests that the problems are not simply institutional, but that they also reflect research attitudes
influenced by the competitive nature of much research
funding, exacerbated by the ‘‘compartmentalised’’
nature of research administration. This points to the
need for change in attitude to collaboration by both
105
administrators and researchers, and a more determined
effort to value inter-disciplinary awareness and
commitment by researchers and managers alike.
These are challenges not only for research funders,
but also for the whole research community. In many
countries there has been little dialogue between
scientists working in the agricultural, environmental
and social research areas, although in Europe there has
been a major increase in communication in conferences dealing with the broader issues of grassland
production and conservation (Durand et al., 2002;
Frame, 2002). In many circumstances competitive
tendering may reduce the prospect of real collaboration, and further initiatives may need to be taken to
increase the dialogue between researchers working in
these different areas and build confidence that good
collaborations can be established.
There is need for further consideration of ways in
which international participation can make national
research more effective. The case for networks of
long-term experiments was made earlier. Individual
experiments will, of necessity, demand considerable
resources, and it is unlikely that a network could be
funded by an individual country. However, where
appropriate, there is potential for networks to include
sites in several countries with individual sites being
funded nationally. In this situation, the formation of a
network has the potential to deliver tremendous added
value through the pooling of information and the
production of integrative models to give robust
conclusions. Long-term network experiments involving different countries have rarely been carried out in
the past, because of difficulty in organisation and
funding. It is unlikely that there will be many
occasions when countries within a zone will commit
their resources to a central fund for initiating such
studies. It is far more likely that they would agree to
fund a single site in their own country.
Opportunities for international linkages have been
provided over a period of 40 years by the International
Biological Programme (1964–1974; see Worthington,
1975; Bremeyer and van Dyne, 1980) and the
International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme
(established in 1986, with a focus for ecosystem
interests provided within it by the Global Change and
Terrestrial Ecosystems programme from 1990; see
Walker and Steffen, 1996). The CGIAR Institutes
(http://www.cgiar.org/) provide a good framework for
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creating zonal programmes for developing countries
and a good focus for establishing collaborations
bilaterally or multi-laterally with National Agricultural Research Institutes. There are also regional
research networks set up by FAO. The European
Cooperative Research Network on Pastures and
Fodder Crops was established in 1976 (its activities
are described in Herba. No. 13, 2003) and there is a
well established research network focussing on
grassland and rangeland in the Himalayan region.
However, these networks generally have funds for
contact and coordination, but not for research.
In Europe the EU has become an increasingly
influential research funder. Financial arrangements
with other developed countries (e.g. Australia,
Canada, USA, Switzerland, Norway) mean that many
countries can participate in programmes initiated
under the aegis of the EU. Currently the EU has a
substantial focus on the environment, land use and on
rural communities, all areas of importance for
grassland. However, funding of individual projects
rarely exceeds four years duration, and thus, with
current arrangements, cannot support projects requiring a long time horizon. The EU support for ‘Centres
of Excellence’ and research networks is of longer
duration.
The International Grassland Congress and the
International Rangeland Congress could provide fora
for discussing and subsequently ‘‘parenting’’ network
experiments, and the European Grassland Federation
has Special Interest Groups that could provide a focus
for the evolution of network experiments. There will
be good returns for encouraging international initiatives both by researchers and by funders in order to
bring such long-term network experiments to fruition.
4. Education and training
There is clearly a conflict between the increased
requirement for broad-based multi-disciplinary
research in the grassland and land use areas and in
the progressive specialisation that has occurred in
tertiary education and the management of research
organisations. Though the importance of breadth in
teaching in grassland science has been emphasised by
some academics (e.g. Bawden et al., 1984; Pearson
and Ison, 1997), market orientation has resulted in
tertiary education programmes becoming increasingly
focussed on specialisation at the expense of general
awareness. There are doubts as to whether this will
produce sufficient scientists with the vision and
experience for the effective initiation, conduct,
management and direction of large inter-disciplinary
programmes.
It is probable that most scientists entering grassland
and land use research will continue to have first degree
training in a specific discipline, so we must consider
how such scientists can develop to contribute most
effectively to broad-based research. Courses with a
focus on land use should be developed to attract a
mixture of students from relevant physical, biological
and social sciences. They should provide awareness
for particular students of disciplines that are new to
them, and real experience of working in genuinely
inter-disciplinary teams to tackle particular problems
and projects.
Early post-doctoral research appointments are
often not conducive to developing inter-disciplinary
skills. Many post-doctoral scientists work on 3-year
projects and have contracts only for that length of
time, maximising the incentive to focus narrowly on
specific, short-term objectives, rather than contributing to broader thinking and activity. Incentives must be
developed to move young researchers out of their
disciplinary ‘‘comfort zone’’ and encourage them to
develop skills important for their future development
(including inter alia the requirements for benefits for
all collaborators, the need to deliver to a tight and
agreed timetable and the imperative of providing
appropriate acknowledgement to collaborators).
The supervisor or research manager also has
important responsibilities and needs the skills and
experience to evolve and manage major multidisciplinary projects. Recognition continues to be a
major problem, with difficulties in developing reward
promotion and tenure criteria for such work and
establishing the contribution of individuals to an
overall programme.
5. Conclusions
This paper has outlined the need for a re-appraisal
of priorities and approaches in the structure and
funding of training and research in grassland science.
G. Lemaire et al. / Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 108 (2005) 99–108
It is concluded that paradigms of ‘‘hard science’’ and
‘‘market-led research’’ are most unlikely to deliver the
appropriate research to meet developing land use and
environmental problems. There is a need to provide a
stronger basis for genuine inter-disciplinary research,
with the emphasis on integrated land use programmes,
effective coordination of production and conservation
interests, and awareness of the underlying socioeconomic and sociological dimensions. Research
funding and management structures need to be
changed to place more emphasis on the broader
aspects of grassland science, and to provide more
incentives for genuine inter-disciplinary collaboration
in teaching and research.
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