Study finds ecosystem disservices significantly underrepresented in crop agriculture research
A new preprint study found that ecosystem disservices — the harms that organisms can cause in agricultural systems — are dramatically underrepresented in scientific literature on annual crop agroecosystems compared to ecosystem services. Researchers built a predicted network of plausible ecological links and compared it to what is actually documented in published research, finding that disservice links were three times more likely to be absent and appeared in roughly six times fewer papers than service links. This gap risks inflating perceived ecological benefits, distorting assessments of key species, and producing unrealistic expectations for biological crop protection strategies.
Researchers publishing on bioRxiv constructed a predicted ecological network of 47 nodes and 103 links representing plausible relationships between ecosystem service providers — taxa or functional groups — and the services or disservices they can deliver in annual crop systems. When compared against a realised network derived from systematic Scopus literature searches, the documented network contained only 33 nodes and 58 links, representing declines of nearly 30% in nodes and nearly 44% in links. Four of nine predicted disservice nodes were entirely absent from the literature, and ecosystem disservice links were three times more likely to go undocumented than ecosystem service links. Ecosystem services were reported in 6.6 times more papers than disservices overall. The study also found that projected networks — which map indirect connections between services and disservices through shared providers — were strongly reduced in the literature, obscuring important trade-offs and multifunctionality. The authors argue this pattern reflects a cognitive bias in the research community that can inflate perceived benefits of ecological interventions and lead to poorly informed crop management decisions, and they call for disservices to be systematically included alongside services in agroecosystem research.
What different sources said
- bioRxivCenter
Ecosystem disservices are underrepresented in literature on annual crop agroecosystems
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