Conservation agriculture enhances ecosystem services and sustainability of the system over conventional agriculture

Ecosystem services (ES) provision and variation over spatial scales in agricultural land are often the result of interactions between agricultural management and ecological structures. Our goal was to evaluate the effect of conservation agriculture (CA) and conventional tillage (CT) practices on different ES and ecosystem disservices (DES) to evaluate their spatial variability, and to develop a new index to determine the sustainability of CA and CT systems in farmers' fields. Under conservation agriculture and conventional tillage, the ecosystem services supplied by wheat-based cropping systems was measured, and the inverse distance weighted (IDW) interpolation technique was used to create maps of spatial variability. A new index, i.e., ecosystem service sustainability index (ESSI) was developed to assess the sustainability of the study area. The gain in food was higher in some parts of the Nilokheri and Taraori villages of Karnal district, where CA was practiced over the years. The gain in regulating service, i.e., SOC stock in the study area ranged between 1.99 and 5.54 Mg ha^-1. The study revealed approximately 178% increase in supporting service, i.e., soil formation in Nilokheri block over the study area. The ESSI of Karnal ranged between 1.48 and 7.60, and for Kaithal district it was between 1.22 and 6.24. In the study area, 67 villages were reported as degraded, 28 villages as vulnerable, 38 villages as sustainable but input intensive, 17 villages as sustainable. By incorporating ecosystem service concepts into conservation agriculture, wheat agroecosystems can be transformed into more robust and sustainable production systems.