ABSTRACT
The terms agroecosystem, farming system, and agricultural system have been used to describe agricultural activities performed by groups of people. Natural resources are the given elements of land, water, climate, and natural vegetation that are exploited by the farmer for agricultural production. Sustainability refers to the ability of an agroecosystem to maintain production through time, in the face of long-term ecological constraints and socioeconomic pressures. Depending on the degree of technological modification, these activities affect five major ecological processes: energetic, hydrological, biogeochemical, successional, and biotic regulation processes. The modern systems require large amounts of imported energy to accomplish the work usually done by ecological processes in less disturbed systems. The net result is an artificial ecosystem that requires constant human intervention. Stability is the constancy of production under a given set of environmental, economic and management conditions. The challenge is to assess the health of agroecosystems to ensure a balanced monitoring of the productivity and ecological integrity of the system.
