Valorising and balancing the ecosystem service benefits offered by legumes, and legume-based cropped systems

The legumES will ensure: 1, the uptake of best practices in agrobiodiverse legume-based cropped systems; 2, the uptake of methodologies and tools to quantify and balance the environmental and economic ecosystem service (ES) benefits provided by legumes; 3, that the ES benefits and cost offered by legumes are quantified across scales from field, farm, regional, national, and global levels; and 4, ES will be assessed to identify those conditions which are able to meet the EU targets: to decrease agrichemical inputs and losses, combat climate change, reverse biodiversity loss, and ensure the best nutritional provisioning.

To achieve this, legumES offers a multi-disciplinary consortium comprising 22 partners from 12 EU- and third countries (UK, CH) and including: 7, academic institutions; 6, Research and Technology Organizations; 5, SMEs (or micro-SMEs); 2, non-governmental organisations; and 2, large commercial companies.

The individuals comprising legumES offer skills which include: agricultural-crop and -environment (ES) monitoring, life cycle assessment, economic- and socioeconomic-modelling, social-science, EU-agricultural and environmental policy, and law, plus decision support systems.

The legumES research and innovation strategy centres on the use of a multiactor action-research approach, that is, where legume-facing stakeholders, and especially producers though all value chains actors, can ‘operate’, ‘collaborate’ and, reflect critically’ on the measured ES benefits and costs of legume-based cropped systems, including legumes use in marginal lands; so that an optimal balance of ES can be achieved with success locally, and globally.

To help achieve this LegumES also centres activities on a suite of 25 innovative legume-based Pilot Studies which use a wide range of legume species and types, plus different cropping approaches and linked value chains spanning the pedoclimatic regions of Europe.