Several ecology and agricultural researchers have published that achieving sustainable food systems requires innovating the ways agroecosystems are studied and understood. One means of innovation might be increasing the use of principles and concepts of complex systems science in agroecological and agriculture systems-based research. However, based on citation rates, few authors directly employ these concepts and principles. The objective of this research was to conduct a bibliographic and text analysis to learn how agroecology researchers are using the term complexity and how they employ principles of complex systems science within the research literature. We collected 4,600 citations and abstracts from the Scopus database using search terms for the keywords agroecology or food systems, sustainability, and complexity. A preliminary review of approximately 70 of the articles was conducted. Additionally, a text and bibliographic analysis are currently under development to compare studies that explicitly use the term complexity in the context of complex systems science versus those that do not. The forthcoming quantitative analysis will uncover semantic context, text topic models, word frequencies, and citation rates related to how authors use and discuss the term complexity in agroecosystems research.
Results/Conclusions
In our preliminary review, we interpreted findings in the literature, looking through the lens of the principles and concepts of complex systems science. This revealed that authors are discussing ideas relevant to studying agroecosystems or food systems within the broad context of agroecosystems as complex adaptive systems without using complexity science-based language. Specifically, several papers examining regional food system sustainability and food security indirectly described complex causal emergence, adaptive capacities among system actors, structural and functional dynamics, and relationally defined spatial-temporal system boundaries. A key question generated by the preliminary review is whether the research community would benefit by more explicitly discussing agroecosystems research within the context of defined principles and concepts of complex systems science.
