Ms. Shraddha Vitthal Vekhande will present her Ph.D. defense as per the details below:
Date: Friday, 12th December 2025
Time: 1130 hrs.
Venue: C-TARA Conference Room No.1
MS Teams details:
Meeting ID: 440 535 517 256 48
Passcode: d7pA3E9j
Title: Towards a Holistic Understanding of Soil Health in Agriculture: Insights from Ecosystem Services and Systems Ecology Approach
Supervisor: Prof. Bakul Rao
Internal Examiner: Prof. Shireesh Kedare
External Examiner: Dr. Pratap Birthal, ICAR-Delhi
Chairperson: Prof. Harish Pillai
Abstract:
In 2010, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the National Academy for Agricultural Sciences reported that 70% of India's cultivated land risks becoming unfit for farming. Despite numerous global and national initiatives aimed at conserving soil health, the challenge of tacking the soil health degradation persists. These challenges underscore the need for a holistic understanding of soil health, one that goes beyond its narrow focus on productivity and recognizes its broader ecological roles, extending beyond food production.
The Ecosystem Service approach provides a comprehensive framework for assessing soil health, yet soil ecosystem services are inadequately explored in existing literature. Additionally, the lack of a systemic understanding of how human actions influence ecological processes and the flow of ecosystem services in agriculture hinders effective soil health assessments. To address these gaps, two objectives were formulated for this research. The first was to develop a set of soil ecosystem services directly linked to agriculture, and to explore the complexity and interrelations among these services through a systemic approach. The second was to demonstrate the utility of this approach in explaining changes in soil ecosystem services due to agricultural practices.
This research identified a comprehensive set of soil ecosystem services relevant to agriculture, set using the Common International Classification of Ecosystem Services (CICES v5.2) as a foundational base. A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) was developed to represent the soil ecosystem, and the shortest independent loop set was identified, reducing the total number of feedback loops to a manageable level for analysis. These feedback loops drive the delivery of ecosystem services, and the linkages among services were studied by analysing the overlap of feedback loops. The soil ecosystem CLD was expanded to include variables representing the agriculture practice of rice nursery cultivation in Palghar, Maharashtra as a case study.
The analysis of ecosystem services indicated that 55% of the total ecosystem services studied are soil ecosystem services, with 50% directly linked to agricultural practices. The feedback loop analysis in the soil ecosystem CLD revealed high-impact variables within the system that are not considered in conventional soil health assessments in agriculture, offering critical insights into overlooked factors that significantly influence ecosystem service delivery. Identifying the limits-to-growth system archetype in the rice nursery case study led to actionable recommendations for improving soil health. The study outputs include a comprehensive set of soil ecosystem services relevant to agriculture, a detailed causal loop diagram representing soil ecosystem dynamics, and an ecosystem service-loop matrix illustrating service interconnections. This study also proposes a theoretical concept of soil health grounded in systems theory, offering a novel approach to assessing and managing soil ecosystems.
This research contributes to the literature by enhancing the understanding of soil health through a systems ecology approach, emphasizing the interconnectedness of ecosystem services and addressing critical conceptual gaps. It lays the foundation for further exploration of human interventions on soil ecosystems. Methodologically, the study introduces causal loop diagrams and the ecosystem service-loop matrix, providing innovative tools for analyzing soil ecosystem dynamics and assessing the impact of agricultural practices. These contributions advance holistic approaches to soil health management and contribute to academic discourse on soil ecosystems in agriculture.
Keywords: Soil Health, Ecosystem Services, Systems Ecology, Causal Loop Diagrams, Agriculture Practice