Agricultural wilding: rewilding for agricultural landscapes through an increase in wild productive systems

Sustainable agricultural landscapes seek to improve environmental, societal and economic outcomes locally and internationally. They depend on functionally biodiverse agricultural systems, i.e., systems that include diversity in plants and/or crops and maintain productive function. These systems are variably defined and are not adequately or consistently represented or ensured across agricultural landscapes. The variability results in inconsistent productive function, and minimally biodiverse agricultural systems and landscapes that degrade the environment, preventing consistent increases in functional biodiverse systems across farming landscapes and impeding long-term societal and economic benefit. The article answers the question: how can the Ecological Sensitivity within Human Realities (ESHR) concept improve consistent and more thorough increases in functional biodiversity outcomes from human natural environment interactions as a conceptual explanation. The ESHR concept for functional biodiversity is introduced and explained using an integrated narrative literature review. Motivation to develop and present the ESHR is an observed and identified need to emphasize the human influence on functional biodiversity outcomes and encourage sensitivity of human interactions with the natural environment through more detailed considerations that might better ensure consistent outcomes. Existing and commonly used concepts that seek to improve biodiversity in agricultural systems are compared to the ESHR to demonstrate novelty. New understandings of ecological and human conditions in coffee farming landscapes are not introduced, instead, the concept substantiates (1) functionally biodiverse agricultural systems rely on consistently functional ecological interactions and processes for all system and landscape complexities by structure, heterogeneity, and interactions, between and across systems; (2) human interactions are influenced by variability in the human condition across individuals and societal groups, referred to as human realities. When compared to the selection of existing concepts of similar intentions it demonstrates to combine strengths of different concepts with improved opportunity for contextual adaptations. Comparatively consistent, comprehensive considerations and functional biodiversity outcomes are encouraged and expected with the use of the ESHR. Recommendations for future use and research are provided.

Comparing and seeking complementarity between four farm design approaches

Most vegetated land on earth has been used for agriculture for hundreds of years, shaping the land’s features and functions. Agricultural (rural) landscapes are the basis for feeding the global population and meeting their many other demands. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, agriculture is facing some crucial challenges: feeding more people whilst maintaining natural resources, biodiversity and landscape heritage, and mitigating climate change. This requires new knowledge, innovations and decision tools for taking responsible action. Research on agricultural landscapes provides analyses to help understand landscape processes and elaborates sustainable scientific, technical and cultural solutions. We report on recent progress in some topics of measuring, modelling and monitoring processes, and on organismic diversity in agricultural landscapes, focusing on developments in Western Europe. Information is also given about long-term experimental agricultural research in Russia and neighbouring countries. Results indicate that there has been considerable progress in understanding landscape processes based on experimental and modelling research on different scales. A number of landscape-related research methods and tools have been developed in recent years. These include high-tech measurement systems, models and decision aids, and tools for monitoring and optimising agricultural systems and for agri-environmental monitoring. Many of them also have potential for successfully tackling existing problems with the sustainability of agricultural systems in other landscapes and regions. Transdisciplinary international research projects are required to make innovations operable.KeywordsAgricultureRural landscapesResearch technologiesExperimentsEuropeRussia

Direct and indirect effects of agricultural expansion and landscape fragmentation processes on natural habitats

Crop Science Society of America Celebrates First Annual Crop Wild Relative Week, September 22–29, 2018

Crop wild relatives or wild plants related to domesticated crops are potential resources for crop improvement. They can be landraces, crop progenitors, and plants closely related to the taxa and are not part of agricultural history. They are enriched with gene pools that are capable of revolutionizing current agriculture. As they possess allelic variations necessary for disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, nutritional value, and ecological adaptations, proper utilization of these better characteristics from wild crop relatives for crop improvement programs can change the agricultural landscape of the world. Presently, the majority of crops have less allelic diversity than their wild relatives and they are susceptible to diseases and other abiotic and biotic stresses, which is also known as the domestication bottleneck. The major cause of the domestication bottleneck was demand for high-yielding varieties and unintended neglectence of other characteristics. But in the wild crop relatives, all such genes were preserved and agricultural scientists started to create new improved lines of crops from crop wild relatives since the 1940s. Advancement in technologies should be reflected in the advancement of crop wild relative dependent crop improvement programs also. Here, we summarize the utilization of wild crops for crop improvement programs through various strategies such as genetic mapping, transgenic approaches, application of genomic tools, and gene editing.

The world population is projected to become 10 billion by the end of this century. This growing population exerts tremendous pressure on our finite food resources. Unfortunately, the lion-share of the global calorie intake is reliant upon a handful of plant species like rice, wheat, maize, soybean and potato. Therefore, it is the need of the hour to expand our dietary reliance to nutritionally rich but neglected, underutilized and yet-to-be-used wild plants. Many wild plants are also having ethnomedicinal and biocultural significance. Owing to their ecosystem plasticity, they are adapted to diverse habitats including marginal, degraded and other disturbed soil systems. Due to these resilient attributes, they can be considered for large-scale cultivation. However, proper biotechnological interventions are important for (i) removing the negative traits (e.g., low yield, slow growth, antinutritional factors, etc.), (ii) improving the positive traits (e.g., nutritional quality, stress tolerance, etc.), as well as (iii) standardizing the mass multiplication and cultivation strategies of such species for various agro-climatic regions. Besides, learning the biocultural knowledge and traditional cultivation practices employed by the local people is also crucial for their exploitation. The Special Issue “Wild Crop Relatives and Associated Biocultural and Traditional Agronomic Practices for Food and Nutritional Security” was intended to showcase the potential wild crop varieties of nutritional significance and associated biocultural knowledge from the diverse agroecological regions of the world and also to formulate suitable policy frameworks for food and nutritional security. The novel recommendations brought by this Special Issue would serve as a stepping stone for utilizing wild and neglected crops as a supplemental food. Nevertheless, long-term cultivation trials under various agro-climatic conditions are utmost important for unlocking the real potential of these species.

The farming system component of European agricultural landscapes

Pressure is increasing globally to increase agricultural production (including bioenergy) per unit area, provide ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, flood control etc., and maintain cultural and biodiverse landscapes. These functions should not be totally separated; rather, we need to develop agricultural systems and landscapes that also provide these services, though the balance between them will vary from place to place. Such systems must be productive, resilient and profitable, raising the issue of how the public benefits of ecosystem services are valued and captured. While many agricultural landscapes will change, there is real scope to develop systems that are both productive and biodiverse – but these need to be well thought through, they will not happen by chance.

Migratory species depend on ephemeral environmental conditions; thus, species distribution modelling (SDM) must incorporate phenological changes along migratory routes. Our overarching goal was to model habitats for three waterfowl species migrating through Eurasian grasslands (red‐breasted goose [ Branta ruficollis ], taiga bean goose [ Anser fabalis fabalis ] and Bewick's swan [ Cygnus columbianus bewickii ]) while accounting for ephemeral environmental conditions. Our objectives were (a) to develop a workflow of mapping ephemeral environmental conditions, (b) model habitats for the three species and (c) evaluate the protection status of habitats in natural and agricultural landscapes. We expected water availability, particularly ephemeral spring waterbodies, to strongly influence these species' distributions. We utilized MODIS data for phenological synchronization of Landsat images to create species‐ and season‐specific metrics and land cover maps. We used Landsat‐derived environmental variables, elevation and bird GPS locations in Maxent SDM. We compared locations of modelled habitats, protected areas and Ramsar sites. Our land cover maps had an overall accuracy of 0.92–0.95 and captured ephemeral water extent during these species' migrations. All models had AUC scores of 0.89–0.94; distance to water, land cover and elevation were the most important variables. Modelled habitats were distributed unevenly and occurred in both natural and agricultural landscapes; 40%–76% fell within croplands. Although most croplands provide a rich food supply, their value as waterfowl habitat critically depended on water availability. Approximately 22% of potential habitat in the natural landscape, but only 3% in croplands, had some level of protection. Synthesis and applications . We demonstrated the potential of phenological synchronization to estimate fine‐scale ephemeral environmental conditions crucial for migratory species. Modelled habitats revealed key stopover sites in both natural and agricultural landscapes. The maps showed gaps in the protected area network of Eurasian grasslands, especially in agriculture. Our workflow could be easily adapted for other species and is broadly relevant for conservation.

This chapter attempts to address sources of variability in arthropod abundance, distribution, and diversity in agricultural systems from an ecological perspective. It provides a framework for viewing agricultural landscapes and agroecosystems in order to better understand some of the sources of variability in arthropod population size, distribution, and community structure and to use this knowledge to design effective sampling programs. One of the principal distinguishing characteristics of agricultural landscapes is nature and frequency of their disturbance regimes. Stream corridors, while typically wide and irregular in natural landscapes, are increasingly narrowed and linearized in agricultural landscapes due to the pressure to increase tillable land. The chapter explores characteristics of patches in terms of size, shape, topography, and the plant forms that make up the patch, to determine how these characteristics may influence the arthropod community.

A number of hypotheses and conceptual models, particularly those emphasizing nonlinear dynamics and self-organization, postulate increases or decreases in complexity in the evolution of drainage basins, topography, soils, ecosystems, and other earth surface systems. Accordingly, it is important to determine under what circumstances and at what scales either trend might occur. This paper is concerned with changes in soil landscape complexity due to redistribution of sediment by fluvial, aeolian, and tillage processes at historical time scales in an agricultural field system near Grifton, North Carolina. Soil mapping and soil stratigraphic investigations were used to identify and map soil changes associated with erosion and deposition by water, wind, and tillage; reconstruct the pre-agricultural soil pattern; and identify transformations between soil types. The Kolmogorov entropy of the pre- and post- agricultural landscapes was then compared. The soil transformations associated with erosion and deposition created four distinct new soils and made possible new transformations among soil series, increasing the number of soil types from seven to 11 and the number of possible transformations from 14 to 22. However, the entropy and complexity of the soil landscape decreased, with associated increases in information and redundancy. The mass redistributions created a lower-entropy landscape by concentrating particular soils and soil transformations in specific landscape settings. This result is contrary to studies showing a trend toward increasing pedological complexity at comparable spatial scales, but over much longer time scales. These results point to the importance of temporal scale, and to the fact that environmental complexity is influenced by factors other than the number of different landscape units present.

Restoration efforts are being implemented globally to mitigate the degradation and loss of wetland habitat; however, the rate and success of wetland vegetation recovery post‐restoration is highly variable across wetland classes and geographies. Here, we measured the recovery of plant diversity along a chronosequence of restored temporary and seasonal prairie wetlands ranging from 0 to 23 years since restoration, including drained and natural wetlands embedded in agricultural and natural reserve landscapes in central Alberta, Canada. We assessed plant diversity using the following structural indicators: percent cover of hydrophytes, native and non‐native species, species richness, and community composition. Our findings indicate that plant diversity recovered to resemble reference wetlands in agricultural landscapes within 3–5 years of restoration; however, restored wetlands maintained significantly lower species richness and a distinct community composition compared to reference wetlands located within natural reserves. Early establishment of non‐native species during recovery, dispersal limitation, and depauperated native seed bank were probable barriers to complete recovery. Determining the success of vegetation recovery provides important knowledge that can be used to improve restoration strategies, especially considering projected future changes in land use and climate.

Genetic diversity is a key part of biodiversity, threatened by human activities that lead to loss of gene flow and reduction of effective population sizes. Gene flow is a result of both landscape connectivity and demographic processes determining the number of dispersing individuals in space and time. Thus, the effect of human impact on processes determining the level of genetic diversity must be interpreted in the context of basic ecological conditions affecting survival and recruitment. When the intensity of human impact and habitat suitability correlate, the effect on genetic diversity and gene flow may be challenging to predict. We compared genetic diversity, gene flow and landscape resistance in two contrasting landscapes in Norway for the pond-breeding amphibian Triturus cristatus: a highly human-impacted, agricultural landscape with ecologically productive habitats, and a forested landscape with less productive habitats and lower levels of human impact. Our results show that genetic diversity was higher and gene flow lower within the forested landscape. Microclimatic moisture conditions and vegetation cover were important determinants of landscape resistance to gene flow within both landscapes. There were indications that landscape resistance was increased by minor roads in the forested landscape, which was not the case for the agricultural landscape, suggesting a higher vulnerability to human interference within the landscape matrix for the populations in less productive habitats. Our findings suggest that the effect of human impact on genetic diversity may not be straightforward but modulated by the ecological conditions underlying local demographic processes. Populations within both landscapes seem to be vulnerable to loss of genetic diversity, but due to different mechanisms. This has implications for the choice of relevant management actions, that is, increasing population stability may be more relevant within an agricultural landscape still permeable for dispersal, while conserving dispersal corridors may be more appropriate in the forested landscape, to avoid isolation and increased genetic drift.

The heritage value of agricultural landscapes is an area of cultural landscape practice receiving renewed attention worldwide due to the current surge of interest in place-making, heritage tourism, food security, sustainable agriculture, and large-scale landscape conservation. Compared to many other countries, agricultural landscapes in the U.S. remain underrepresented in heritage recognition programs and are not widely embraced as a heritage conservation priority. In this context, international conservation practice offers ideas for integrating heritage values into strategies for environmental, economic, and social sustainability. This review of U.S. and international initiatives demonstrates that the time is right for new strategies recognizing the full value of agricultural landscapes. To advance conservation of designated agricultural landscapes and their rural contexts in the U.S., this paper recommends that the National Park Service (NPS), in collaboration with a diverse array of partners, create a “Rural Heritage Agenda.” This ambitious undertaking will more consistently link recognition of heritage values with community-led efforts for conservation of U.S. agricultural landscapes.