Assessment of Agricultural Biodiversity in Organic Livestock Farms in Italy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This work presents an original approach proposing a set of indicators to assess the planned biodiversity in livestock farming systems, i.e. the biodiversity related to crop and livestock that is purposely included and managed by humans within agroecosystems. This is a necessary approach as there exists a multitude of livestock farming systems globally that tend to be simplified and homogenized in sustainability studies. Besides, planned agrobiodiversity and its importance are, in general, much less studied than wildlife or associated biodiversity. Authors present a set of 14 indicators organized with respect to their relationship to ecosystem functions and services, and their required values to assume an optimal performance of livestock farms. They tested this methodology on 12 organic livestock farms from Italy and extract conclusions from results.

Although the paper is original, presents a holistic perspective, and its general topic is of great interest, a better focus should be given to the Introduction, Methodology and Results sections.

The introduction section is very informative. However, the authors could improve the introduction by clearly stating the research gap –i.e. the lack of indicators to assess the state of planned agrobiodiversity in livestock farming systems– in the beginning, and explaining why this is important, and how it is related to livestock sustainability. This is in line with the author's message, but it can be reinforced by restructuring the presented information in relation to the research gap. For example: how could the proposed indicators contribute to incorporating the heterogeneity of livestock systems in current debates? Which is the potential of integrating planned agrobiodiversity in the assessment of livestock impacts? Is there any tendency to lose planned agrobiodiversity nowadays, as it is happening with associated biodiversity? Why is it desirable to maintain high levels of planned biodiversity in livestock systems?

In addition, authors incorporate a large bibliography on methodologies and indicators to assess the sustainability of farming systems, but less attention is paid to the efforts done to create and standardize indicators to assess biodiversity in farming systems (e.g. Herzog F, Balázs K, Dennis P, Friedel J, Geijzendorffer I, Jeanneret P, Kainz M, Pointereau P. Biodiversity indicators for European farming systems: a guidebook. ART-Schriftenreihe. 2012(17)), which may be relevant for this work.

Regarding proposed planned biodiversity indicators, while authors make a proper effort to cluster indicators based on ecosystem functions and services and farm drivers, they do not specify for which kind of livestock farms is this methodology prepared (is this for any kind of livestock farms? conventional, organic, extensive, intensive, in any kind of environment, etc?), and which desired scenarios they pursue, which limits the proposed methodology.

Authors may improve definitions, arguments given (and referred literature) for each indicator and desired values. For example, what is exactly considered a field and a parcel? Why is it desirable that all parcels are adjacent to each other? Why is this better to be adjacent to a parcel than a natural area? Why do authors not include green infrastructures or margins as an indicator if it is the provided explanation? Why is a hectare an ecological unit in livestock farms? Etcetera.

Another important concern is regarding the methodology test. It is not clear to me how the validation of the methodology has been designed and if a total of 12 farms could be sufficient to test 14 indicators. The author could provide more information regarding this. In this sense, do the identified farms represent the desirable type of farms pursued by authors? Why all of them are organic farms? Is the methodology not appropriate for conventional farms? Are the selected farms appropriate to test these indicators? Why? Do they represent the main typologies of farms and animal production types in each region?

All these aspects should be considered in the result section when explaining the found outcomes from each region and product type. Besides, authors must consider in their evaluation the differences between production types, since, in general terms, these are associated with different farm structures and planned biodiversity, which could influence to test of the indicators.

Author Response

Bra, 10th February 2022

 

Dear Editor,

 

            I am pleased to enclose here with an electronic copy of the REVISED paper entitled “Assessment of agricultural biodiversity in organic livestock farms in Italy”, by Chiara Flora Bassignana, Paolo Merante, Samanta Rosi, Concetta Vazzana and Paola Migliorini, for publication on MDPI Agronomy Journal.

 

We thank you and reviewers a lot for the comments. We have revised the paper accordingly. In particular we have answered Reviewer 1.

Please note that the name of one author was wrong and needs to be corrected as following:  Samanta Rosi Bellière.

We attach the track changes version of the paper and the answer to the reviewer below.

 

 

We hope that you are satisfied with our revision.

 

I’m available for further clarification,

 

Kind regards

Paola Migliorini

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Title: Assessment of agricultural biodiversity in organic livestock farms in Italy

The article offers a framework for measuring the agrobiodiversity level of production systems at the farm level. To do this it proposes the calculation methodology of a set of 14 standardised indicators, which can be utilized to compare farms e systems for an assessment of their environmental and socio-economic sustainability levels. The methodology was tested in Italy, on a group of organic livestock farms, chosen from different regions and livestock systems in order to represent the various production realities of the sector. The methodological framework specifically was applied to livestock farming systems, elaborating a methodology that allows assessing agrobiodiversity in these contexts in a relatively fast way.

Despite many methodological approaches have been proposed to measure and evaluate the agrobiology of agricultural systems, the method presented in the article appears to be highly interesting as previous studies on the subject are mainly focused on the assessment of associated biodiversity to the agricultural landscape and not in particular on planned agrobiodiversity, deriving from the production choices of farmers. Moreover, often the indicators proposed to require intensive specific fieldwork analyses, that entail time and specialists to carry them out.

To collect data for the verification of the proposed methods were used cases studies of 12 livestock farms, to which two questionnaires were submitted at different times, the first in 2005 and the second in 2021, so they were able to use longitudinal data with a time span of 15 years. The authors present results and discuss the empirical analysis, that was conducted using an analysis of variance and mean comparisons evaluated with the Bonferroni test, however, the sample is too small to be able to carry out an evaluation of agrobiodiversity levels associated with the analysed systems.

The methods used in the article were robust and coherent to ensure high quality in the accuracy of the estimates, and they have been well described and reasoned in the article. The theoretical issues are also well treated in the article.

Author Response

 

We thank you for these viable comments.