Compare methods

	Agroecosystem Analysis	On-Farm Agrobiodiversity Index
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2008
Originator	Gordon R. Conway	Devra Jarvis & colleagues (on-farm crop-variety diversity framework); diversity indices after Magurran
Type	Systems-diagnosis pipeline for agroecosystem performance	Descriptive diversity-index pipeline for cultivated and reared diversity on farms
Seminal source	Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117.	Jarvis, D. I., Brown, A. H. D., Cuong, P. H., Collado-Panduro, L., Latournerie-Moreno, L., Gyawali, S., et al. (2008). A global perspective of the richness and evenness of traditional crop-variety diversity maintained by farming communities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(14), 5326-5331.
Aliases	AEA, Agroecosystem Properties Analysis, Conway Agroecosystem Analysis, Agroecosystem Diagnosis	On-Farm Crop Diversity Index, Agrobiodiversity Index, Farm Varietal Diversity Index, Cultivated Diversity Index
Related	4	4
Summary	Agroecosystem analysis (AEA) is a systems-diagnosis framework, formalized by Gordon Conway in 1987, that characterizes any agricultural system through four properties: productivity, stability, sustainability, and equitability. Rather than judging a farming system by yield alone, AEA treats the agroecosystem as an ecological system shaped by human management and asks how much it produces, how reliably it produces it across seasons and shocks, whether it can maintain output over the long run, and how its benefits are distributed among the people who depend on it. The analyst bounds a system at an appropriate hierarchical level — plot, field, farm, watershed, or region — and uses interdisciplinary teams, ranked questions, and simple structured diagrams to surface the key relationships and the trade-offs among the four properties that drive design and policy choices.	The on-farm agrobiodiversity index applies the mathematics of biological diversity — richness, evenness, and combined indices such as Shannon, Simpson and Margalef — to the crops, landraces, varieties and livestock breeds that farmers actually maintain in their fields and herds. Rather than counting wild species in an ecosystem, it quantifies cultivated and reared diversity: how many distinct crop species and varieties a farm grows, how evenly the area or production is spread across them, and how this compares between farms, communities and regions. Devra Jarvis and a large international team showed in 2008 that these measures of richness, evenness and divergence reveal substantial crop-variety diversity still maintained on farms worldwide and provide a sound basis for indicators of on-farm conservation. Built on Magurran's standard diversity formulas, the index turns agrobiodiversity into measurable, comparable numbers for research and policy.