Estimating resilience of crop production systems: From theory to practice.

Agricultural production systems are sensitive to weather and climate anomalies and extremes as well as to other environmental and socio-economic adverse events. An adequate evaluation of the resilience of such systems helps to assess food security and the capacity of society to cope with the effects of global warming and the associated increase of climate extremes. Here, we propose and apply a simple indicator of resilience of annual crop production that can be estimated from crop production time series.

An indicator to map diffuse chemical river pollution considering buffer capacity of riparian vegetation--a pan-European case study on pesticides.

Vegetated riparian areas alongside streams are thought to be effective at intercepting and controlling chemical loads from diffuse agricultural sources entering water bodies. Based on a recently compiled European map of riparian zones and a simplified soil chemical balance model, we propose a new indicator at a continental scale. QuBES (Qualitative indicator of Buffered Emissions to Streams) allows a qualitative assessment of European rivers exposed to pesticide input.