Agroecosystem Analysis
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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117. · DOI 10.1016/0308-521X(87)90056-4
- Collinson, M. P. (Ed.) (2000). A History of Farming Systems Research. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing & FAO. · ISBN 9780851994055
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.