ZALF (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research)

Experience

ZALF is an institution of the Leibniz Association that aims to deliver solutions for an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable agriculture – together with society. As a contribution to overcoming global challenges such as climate change, food security, biodiversity conservation and resource scarcity, we develop and design crop systems, integrated in their landscape contexts, that combine food security with sustainability. Therefore we process complex landscape data with a unique set of experimental methods, new technologies and models as well as socio-economic approaches. ZALF research is integrated systems research: starting from processes in soils and plants to causal relationships on the field and landscape level up to global impacts and complex interactions between landscapes, society and economy. Partner of this project is the ZALF working group Governance of Ecosystem Services, which focuses on governance approaches that allow for targeted provisioning of societally desired ecosystem services and biodiversity objectives, in particular financial incentives and their interactions with regulative law and voluntary cooperation.