Bordeaux Sciences Agro, Univ. Bordeaux, UMR 1391 ISPA, F-33175 Gradignan, France; INRA, UMR 1391 ISPA, F-33883 Villenave d'Ornon, France.
Bordeaux Sciences Agro, Univ. Bordeaux, UMR 1391 ISPA, F-33175 Gradignan, France.
Sci Total Environ. 2016 Feb 1;543(Pt A):467-479. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.11.032. Epub 2015 Nov 19.
Improvement in nutrient recycling in agriculture is essential to maintain food production while minimising nutrient pollution of the environment. For this purpose, understanding and modelling nutrient cycles in food and related agro-industrial systems is a crucial task. Although nutrient management has been addressed at the plot and farm scales for many years now in the agricultural sciences, there is a need to upscale these approaches to capture the additional drivers of nutrient cycles that may occur at the local, i.e. district, scale. Industrial ecology principles provide sound bases to analyse nutrient cycling in complex systems. However, since agro-food social-ecological systems have specific ecological and social dimensions, we argue that a new field, referred to as "Agro-Industrial Ecology", is needed to study these systems. In this paper, we review the literature on nutrient cycling in complex social-ecological systems that can provide a basis for Agro-Industrial Ecology. We identify and describe three major approaches: Environmental Assessment tools, Stock and Flow Analysis methods and Agent-based models. We then discuss their advantages and drawbacks for assessing and modelling nutrient cycles in agro-food systems in terms of their purpose and scope, object representation and time-spatial dynamics. We finally argue that combining stock-flow methods with both agent-based models and environmental impact assessment tools is a promising way to analyse the role of economic agents on nutrient flows and losses and to explore scenarios that better close the nutrient cycles at the local scale.
农业中养分循环的改善对于维持粮食生产、同时将养分对环境的污染最小化至关重要。为此，了解和模拟食品及相关农业产业系统中的养分循环是一项关键任务。尽管养分管理在农业科学领域已经在地块和农场层面上得到了多年的关注，但需要将这些方法扩展到地方（即地区）尺度，以捕捉可能发生的养分循环的其他驱动因素。工业生态学原理为分析复杂系统中的养分循环提供了合理的基础。然而，由于农业食品社会-生态系统具有特定的生态和社会维度，我们认为需要一个新的领域，即“农业工业生态学”，来研究这些系统。在本文中，我们回顾了关于复杂社会-生态系统中养分循环的文献，这些文献可以为农业工业生态学提供基础。我们确定并描述了三种主要方法：环境评估工具、存量和流量分析方法以及基于主体的模型。然后，我们根据其目的和范围、对象表示和时空动态，讨论了它们在评估和模拟农业食品系统中的养分循环方面的优缺点。最后，我们认为将存量-流量方法与基于主体的模型和环境影响评估工具相结合，是分析经济主体对养分流动和损失的作用以及探索在地方尺度上更好地闭合养分循环的情景的一种有前途的方法。
