Vincent de Leijster

141 Synthesis and conclusion 7 services and provisioning services on orchards where the soil is completely covered with vegetation. A combination of practices, such as vegetation cover with organic amendments, may prevent such trade-offs, but this needs further research. To conclude, ecosystemservices may improve rather rapidly after agroecological interventions; however, each practice may enhance a specific set of ecosystem services, so it may be expected that combining them leads to improved ecosystem services. My co-authors and I followed up on these findings in Chapter 4 , where we modeled the economic implications of agroecological management in Spanish almond orchards and the types of incentives that may influence the outcome. More specifically, we modeled the development of Net Present Value (NPV; economic performance) of the same agroecological interventions as in Chapter 3, based on empirical data on almond production obtained from the experiments in Chapter 3 and data on costs and benefits derived from farmer surveys. We found that all practices resulted in profitable outcomes; however, there were differences between practices. We had data on more production years than in Chapter 3 and based on this we found that the production using no tillage and green manure was lower when using conventional tillage, resulting in lower NPVs. Nevertheless, compost application resulted in higher production than conventional tillage and thus in a higher NPV. The difference in income between no tillage and green manure on the one hand, and conventional management on the other is referred to as opportunity costs. We evaluated which economic incentives may compensate for these opportunity costs, and in this way facilitate the adoption of vegetation cover practices. We found that public incentives (greening subsidies) and private incentives (price premiums) can be used to compensate for the opportunity costs, but this is only possible when compensation is 5-7 times higher than the amount currently paid. We found that the effectiveness of these mechanisms is currently rather modest, as carbon prices are low and changes in carbon stock in Mediterranean agroecosystems are small and take time. Conventional tillage showed the highest shadow costs of erosion, but these costs did not counterbalance the opportunity costs. In sum, we found that compost application provides a win-win outcome, leading to both higher profitability and better ecological outcomes. Vegetation cover (no tillage and green manure) results in opportunity costs, which may be compensated by greening subsidies or price premiums. More research is needed on longer term economic impacts of agroecological practices and more research to understand whether a combination of compost and vegetation covers may optimize both ecological and economic outcomes while reducing dependency on external incentives. In Chapter 5 , we assessed the long-term developments of ecosystem services in our second case study, agroecological transitions in Colombian coffee systems. To this end,