LegumES
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LegumES will
- promote the uptake of best practices in agrobiodiverse legume-based cropped systems;
- promote the uptake of methodologies and tools to quantify and balance the environmental and economic ecosystem service (ES) benefits provided by legumes;
- quantify the ES benefits and costs offered by legumes across scales from field, farm, regional, national, and global levels;
- assess ES 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 multidisciplinary consortium comprising 22 partners from 12 EU- and third countries. 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 through 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.
