Can we design agricultural systems that produce sustainable materials for the European bioeconomy while protecting and enhancing the biodiversity of agro-ecosystems? This is one of the critical questions at the heart of the MIDAS project, which is tackling this challenge head-on, with a multi-year study, monitoring biodiversity across our 19 demo fields on marginal land across Europe. It’s year three, and although the study is still ongoing the current results are pretty exciting.
As an example, our partners at CREA Ricerca recently published a paper indicating that growing industrial crops such as safflower and poplar together in an agroforestry system can actually benefit biodiversity .
Both safflower oil and biomass from poplar can be used for a range of bio-based products.
The study monitored arthropod diversity—a key indicator of ecosystem health— by placing a series of traps across 5 fields with different farming systems:
1️⃣ – 2️⃣ two traditional tree plantations (Poplar and Eucalyptus),
3️⃣ a safflower field at flowering stage,
4️⃣ a field with wheat residues,
5️⃣ and an agroforestry plantation with medium-rotation poplar stands and safflower crops grown in the interspace between the tree rows.
The fields are located at the MIDAS demo field at CREA Ricerca in Monterotondo, Rome, characterised by soil wetness and waterlogging in rainy seasons. Data collection focused on evaluating the total animal biomass (weight and number) and the richness and evenness components of diversity.
The results revealed hat the total biomass, richness, and evenness of the collected arthropods varied in the different fields, with higher values recorded in the agroforestry system, compared to the other traditional systems (61.24% higher than in the eucalyptus plantation, 58.91% higher than in the wheat residues, 42.63% higher than in the flowering safflower field, and 11.63% higher than in the poplar plantation).
Although still preliminary, these results suggest that innovative, mixed-cropping approaches such as agroforestry are highly suitable for supporting biodiversity. This research provides evidence-based insight demonstrating that well-desgined bio-based value chains can help to recover marginal land, while generating opportunites for farmers and protecting our agroecosystems.
New data from from this year’s monitoring campaign at this and the other MIDAS sites are being analysed in these weeks.
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Discover more about the MIDAS demo field at CREA IT in this video
