Valorising and balancing the ecosystem service benefits offered by legumes, and legume-based cropped systems

LegumES will

1. promote the uptake of best practices in agrobiodiverse legume-based cropped systems;
2. promote the uptake of methodologies and tools to quantify and balance the environmental and economic ecosystem service (ES) benefits provided by legumes;
3. quantify the ES benefits and costs offered by legumes across scales from field, farm, regional, national, and global levels;
4. assess ES to identify those conditions which are able to meet the EU targets: to decrease agrichemical inputs and losses, combat climate change, reverse biodiversity loss, and ensure the best nutritional provisioning.

To achieve this, legumES offers a multidisciplinary consortium comprising 22 partners from 12 EU- and third countries. The legumES research and innovation strategy centres on the use of a multiactor action-research approach, that is, where legume-facing stakeholders, and especially producers through all value chains actors, can ‘operate’, ‘collaborate’ and, reflect critically on the measured ES benefits and costs of legume-based cropped systems, including legumes use in marginal lands; so that an optimal balance of ES can be achieved with success locally, and globally. To help achieve this, LegumES also centres activities on a suite of 25 innovative legume-based Pilot Studies which use a wide range of legume species and types, plus different cropping approaches and linked value chains spanning the pedoclimatic regions of Europe.

• State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI)
• European Union (EU)

• European Commission, Horizon Europe

• Universidade Catolica Portuguesa, Portugal
• Terres Inovia, France
• Seges Innovation PS, Denmark
• Universita degli Studi di Perugia, Italy
• Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung (ZALF) e.V., Germany
• Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung (PIK), Germany
• Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
• Creative Minds-Solucoes Globais deComunicacao Marketing E Gestao LDA, Portugal
• ITC - Inovacijsko Tehnoloski Grozd Murska Sobota, Slovenia
• ESSRG Nonprofit Kft, Hungary
• Institut Jozef Stefan, Slovenia
• Deutsches Institut für Lebensmitteltechnik (DIL), Germany
• Agri Kulti Nonprofit Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Hungary
• Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, Germany
• Asociacion Aprisco de las Corchuelas, Spain
• Solintagro SL, Spain
• AG Futura Technologii Dooel Skopje, North Macedonia
• Arcadia International GEIE, Belgium
• Eidgenössisches Departement für Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung, Switzerland
• Forschungsinstitut für Biologischen Landbau (FiBL Switzerland), Switzerland
• The James Hutton Institute, United Kingdom
• RSK ADAS Limited, United Kingdom

• Meier Claudia (Department of Food System Sciences)

• Klaiss Matthias (Department of Soil Sciences)

Project partner

• cordis.europa.eu: Project on the CORDIS website

• Cultivation Technique Arable Crops (Department of Soil Sciences, FiBL Switzerland)
• Evaluation & Impact Assessment (Department of Food System Sciences, FiBL Switzerland)