Managing agricultural landscapes is challenging due to their complexity as these include ecosystems with markedly different managements, such as forests, grasslands and arable land. Farms are arguably the most important nexus for landscape management and food production, but they may also be hotspots for environmental pollution. Optimising farm productivity while minimising environmental trade-offs often requires taking a “bird’s eye view” where simulation models can be leveraged to better understand their dynamics.

In this Project, we integrate a terrestrial ecosystem model (LandscapeDNDC) with a whole-farm model (FarmAC) as each synergises with the weaknesses of the other. LandscapeDNDC provides a framework to meet farmers’ needs by simulating crop yields, while addressing policymakers’ environmental concerns by simulating soil processes such as denitrification, ammonia volatilisation and nitrate leaching. FarmAC complements it by simulating farm operations related to manure management, tracking nutrient flows from livestock feed to manure application.

Using Denmark as a case-study, this bottom-up integration fulfils two important roles in landscape management. Firstly, it provides a farm decision-support tool that allows its users to gain insight on how to balance agricultural production and environmental impacts. Secondly, this approach can be upscaled to larger spatial domains, such as a catchment or a country, where it can be used to tackle different research questions. For instance, what would be the agricultural management practice with the largest potential to minimize greenhouse gas emissions in Denmark? Where would site-specific targeting yield the greatest benefits?