Ecological interactions between crops and wild animals frequently result in increases or declines in crop yield. Yet, positive and negative interactions have mostly been treated independently, owing partly to disciplinary silos in ecological and agricultural sciences. We advocate a new integrated research paradigm that explicitly recognizes cost-benefit trade-offs among animal activities and acknowledges that these activities occur within social-ecological contexts. Support for this paradigm is presented in an evidence-based conceptual model structured around five evidence statements highlighting emerging trends applicable to sustainable agriculture. The full range of benefits and costs associated with animal activities in agroecosystems cannot be quantified by focusing on single species groups, crops, or systems. Management of productive agroecosystems should sustain cycles of ecological interactions between crops and wild animals, not isolate these cycles from the system. Advancing this paradigm will therefore require integrated studies that determine net returns of animal activity in agroecosystems.

Ongoing debate over the ecosystem services (ES) concept highlights a range of contrasting views and misconceptions. Schröter et al. (2014) summarize seven recurring arguments against the ES concept, which broadly relate to ethical concerns, translation across the science-policy interface, and how the concept's normative aims and optimistic assumptions affect ES as a scientific approach. In particular, recent criticism has focused on how the concept is unable to address ecological complexity due to the limitations of the economic stock-flow model that ES is based on (Norgaard 2010). Acknowledging ecosystem disservices (EDS) (i.e., outcomes of ecosystem functions that negatively affect human communities) has been suggested as a way to account for this ecological complexity (McCauley 2006; Lyytimäki 2015).