A conceptual model for site-specific agricultural land-use

•Site-specific land-use concepts are essential for future agricultural land use.•Rather than addressing only particular land-use problems, a systemic approach must be established.•Modeling tools must support decision-making for future land-use schemes.

Land-use concepts provide decision support for the most efficient usage options according to sustainable development and multifunctionality requirements. However, developments in landscape-related, agricultural production schemes are primarily driven by economic benefits. Therefore, most agricultural land-use concepts tackle particular problems or interests and lack a systemic perspective. As a result, we discuss a conceptual model for future site-specific agricultural land-use with an inbuilt requirement for adequate experimental sites to enable monitoring systems for a new generation of ecosystem models and for new approaches to address science–stakeholder interactions.