Experience and trust to handle uncertainty of biodiversity responses to innovative agricultural practices: Lessons from citizen science on farms

Abstract As for any innovation, integrating farmland biodiversity into agricultural practices is a complex process, leading to decisions made under uncertainty, due to the difficulty of foreseeing the consequences of decisions. This uncertainty comes under many different forms, depending among others on the type of environmental innovation in agriculture, in a continuum from Efficiency/Substitution‐Based Agriculture (ESBA) to Biodiversity‐Based Agriculture (BBA). To handle this uncertainty, new knowledge production tools, some of which rely on citizen science on farms (CSOF), are developed. They aim to support decision‐making by collecting large databases but also by enabling knowledge production ‘on the field’, directly by farmers. Yet, the ability of CSOF to actually meet these challenges has little been studied. It is now necessary to understand how new biodiversity knowledge production tools are designed and used. Using a user‐centred approach, we analysed a CSOF monitoring scheme, the Farmland Biodiversity Observatory (FBO), wherein farmers monitored biodiversity in their fields (3558 fields, from 2011 to 2023, still ongoing). As insiders in the research group, and using an exploratory approach based on 32 interviews, we observed an operational limitation of the scientific knowledge produced, which fails at producing technical recommendations to protect biodiversity locally. While this led to a difficulty to offer prescriptive practices, some participants shifted to non‐prescriptive knowledge, that is, they accepted high uncertainty and used FBO to gain knowledge and navigate through this uncertainty. As a theoretical result, we witnessed that shifting to high uncertainty due to the complexity of ecological processes consists in accepting a leap into the unknown. Farmers must trust the action of biodiversity, making themselves ‘vulnerable’ with respect to the possible responses of the ecosystems to a change in farming practices. We identified several factors likely to favour this trust towards biodiversity. As a practical outcome, our results show that, to work with biodiversity, farmers must move from reduction and control of uncertainty to acceptance and reliance on trust towards biodiversity. The ensuing management recommendation is to favour a clinical and contextual production of knowledge, emerging from individual experience, over a controlled, standardised and statistical production, inherited from industrialization. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.