Agroecological Farming Practices for Enhancing Biodiversity Conservation and Ecosystem Resilience

Abstract

Abstract— Conventional agricultural practices have lost their ecological vigor due to erosion of biodiversity, loss of soil fertility and high variability of the climate which call for smart agroecological management strategies. In this paper, an Agroecological Farming Framework is suggested and applied, which combines multisource environmental sensing, precision field monitoring, biodiversity assessment and machine learning-based decision support for improving biodiversity conservation and ecosystem resilience. The framework that has been implemented includes soil and microclimate sensors connected to the IoT, UAV imagery, satellite-derived Vegetation Indexes, GIS mapping, and a predictive model based on XGBoost for assessing ecological conditions and providing sustainable management of agriculture. Experimental evaluation was carried out in 12 agricultural fields of 486 ha where the data about the environment was gathered during 18 months (158,420 records of the sensors, 9,860 images taken from an unmanned aircraft and 24 biodiversity indicators). The proposed framework correctly classified 97.84% of the biodiversity, predicted 96.92% of the ecosystem health, accurately assessed the habitat suitability 98.15%, predicted the pollinator diversity 95.76% and predicted the land-cover 96.48% with 28.6% reduction in fertilizer application; 34.2% reduction in pesticide usage; 22.7% reduction in irrigation demand; 19.4% increase in species richness; and 16.3% increase in crop productivity. The novelty of this work comes from the fact that it brings together the implementation of real-time ecological monitoring, AI-based biodiversity prediction and precision agroecological management in a single framework for the purpose of sustainable farming. The proposed system is an effective decision support platform for the conservation of biodiversity, the improvement of the resilience of ecosystems, the efficient use of resources and the development of climate resilient agricultural production.