Adaptive management, a critical component of long term agri-environmental monitoring: Reflection on the 15 years of operation of the North Wyke Farm Platform

The ability to deliver ecosystem goods and services as a co-product to agricultural production is an important goal in societal response to environmental change, carbon removal and the need for food. The North Wyke Farm Platform (NWFP) https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/national-capability/north-wyke-farm-platform is a farm scale long-term experiment established in 2010 with the purpose of furthering the understanding of ecosystem and productivity responses to land and farm management practices (Orr et al. 2016, Takahashi et al. 2018). The platform now supports four farming systems; two pasture based ruminant systems, one housed beef system, and one arable system. For each component process, data is collected at a range of temporal and spatial scales and with differing degrees of automation. At the time of writing over 100 million data points have been recorded including those for productivity, emissions, soils, biodiversity. The data collections are Open and managed under FAIR principles. Agricultural systems emerge because of management intervention. Consequently, the responses of the ecosystem within which the production system is located are linked to the management intervention. An ongoing challenge at the NWFP is the ability to implement management changes reflective of industrial practice and of policy relevance, but in parallel ensure that the experimental design is not compromised, and the data output of the platform is robust. Stakeholder engagement methodologies, affordability of proposed interventions, policy environment, funding priorities technology changes, skills availability and institutional leadership will all affect adaptive management practices. After nearly 15 years of operation, we can reflect on challenges of the management component of the NWFP and our academic and organisational responses. In this paper, we present these reflections as a critique of our approach and consider our actions through the lens of decision science to both signal what lessons we think, (or hope) we have learned and to help other teams identify themes for consideration as they seek to integrate adaptive management into long-term ecological research.