Food environmental footprint: Evolution of the countryside species-area relationship (SAR) with new methodologies

The species-area relationship (SAR) is one of the oldest in ecology, linking the increase in species richness in sampling area. Later, new parameters were incorporated into its equation, such as taxon-specific responses, habitats use by species and species adapted to human-modified habitats, originating the Countryside SAR, a version intended to integrate the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, which is still inefficiencies when used to evaluate food production systems. Therefore, we present the first attempt to incorporate into Countryside SAR the minimum land demand parameter for food production, the food environmental footprint - EFP, and improve the use of the method within the agricultural sciences scope. To prepare the EFP, we used land cover data for two types of food systems: agriculture (annual crops), composed of nine types of food; and, livestock (pasture), consisting of meat production. They were later tested in inventories for the Western European broadleaf forest ecoregion (ecocode: PA0445). The most important result observed was that the models responded to variations in production values, resulting in higher impact and a more conservative result when EFP is adopted. But as historically integrating a productivity parameter, or performance of production systems, has been left out of the development of SAR, only the first step has been taken. Therefore, incorporating minimum land demand for food production into the Countryside SAR appears to be a new stage in its development, allowing to generate results that consider the "efficiency" of food production, assuming a more agronomic profile. However, this is still the first attempt to include the EFP in the Countryside SAR, and we believe that our models should still be subject to further evaluation.