Watershed/landscape scale ecosystem services and Land Use for Sustainable Agricultural Food Production

In many regions, increases in agricultural yields are often achieved through the expansion of agricultural land, which fragments natural ecosystems, or through intensive farming practices that can degrade soil health, diminish biodiversity, and disturb hydrological cycles.

To address these urgent issues, nature-based solutions (NbS) may offer essential mechanisms that support the shift towards a nature-positive food system. Within agricultural production systems, NbS incorporate widely recognized sustainable practices, including techniques such as crop rotation, cover cropping, buffer zones, and no-till methods. Generally, the influence of these techniques is assessed within the context of an individual farm or local project, and understanding how to plan NbS deployment at the landscape/watershed scale is still needed, including ultifunctionality and going beyond crop yield in an integrated, multi-scale approach.


Ecosystem processes such as hydrological regulation and sediment transport are influenced by interactions that extend beyond the boundaries of individual fields or sites. Consequently, the success of local interventions frequently relies on processes occurring at broader scales, such as watersheds and landscapes, and the effectiveness of farm-scale land use may diminish at larger levels when implemented in isolation.

To transition from isolated interventions to landscape-level change, agricultural systems and NbS must be combined to deliver benefits beyond crop yield. This approach treats agricultural landscapes as multifunctional systems where water, soil, biodiversity, and production goals are collectively addressed. Hydrological models are integral to this process, offering a quantitative framework to predict how different management strategies affect water movement, storage, and quality. They provide a critical link between farm-scale practices and the sustainability of entire watersheds.

We invite a wide range of scientific contributions to explore this theme, including original research, innovative methodologies, theoretical perspectives, literature reviews, and modeling approaches. We are particularly interested in contributions that address the following topics:



· Implementing sustainable soil and water management practices and nature-based solutions that enhance climate resilience and food security.

· Developing modeling and decision-support tools for the integration of ecosystem services in land-use and food system design.

· Evaluating landscape-scale hydrological services, such as runoff regulation, erosion control, and water storage, across various land-use mosaics.

· Applying nature-based solutions and landscape design to restore degraded soils and enhance ecosystem services across scales.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: land use, food systems, nature-based solutions (NbS), agricultural systems, landscapes

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.