Agro-ecological Landscapes Research Articles

Impacts of climate change on agro-ecological landscapes in the coastal area of the Thai Binh province (Vietnam) using the Delphi technique

Purpose– This paper aims to facilitate the joint assessment of issues related to the agricultural systems, i.e. agriculture, aquaculture and climate change (CC) response strategies, in the coastal districts with a panel of stakeholders; and to evaluate the level of agreement on the topics under consideration and potentially identify the most promising approaches to assessing CC affecting agricultural systems in the area and identify relevant and adequate response strategies.Design/methodology/approach– Stakeholder Delphi technique – its assessment is an interactive method of qualitative research used to facilitate the interactive participation of varied and conceivably hierarchical and antagonistic stakeholder groups.Findings– The most important result for the province is that the impact of climate change on agro-ecological landscapes (poverty and near river areas) is the duration of cold weather, more frequent and extreme. Moreover, Kendall’s W test gave a score of 0.547, which indicates a “strong” stakeholder agreement and the “confidence in ranks” being “high” in Thai Binh (Vietnam).Originality/value– The scientific results in this study are intended to serve as relevant knowledge-inputs and direct contributions to capacity-building for the local partners (stakeholders and local authorities). These local partners are engaged in policy-making and effective planning and implementation of climate response measures in the districts in the province of Thai Binh.

The dawn of Structural One Health: A new science tracking disease emergence along circuits of capital

The One Health approach integrates health investigations across the tree of life, including, but not limited to, wildlife, livestock, crops, and humans. It redresses an epistemological alienation at the heart of much modern population health, which has long segregated studies by species. Up to this point, however, One Health research has also omitted addressing fundamental structural causes underlying collapsing health ecologies. In this critical review we unpack the relationship between One Health science and its political economy, particularly the conceptual and methodological trajectories by which it fails to incorporate social determinants of epizootic spillover. We also introduce a Structural One Health that addresses the research gap. The new science, open to incorporating developments across the social sciences, addresses foundational processes underlying multispecies health, including the place-specific deep-time histories, cultural infrastructure, and economic geographies driving disease emergence. We introduce an ongoing project on avian influenza to illustrate Structural One Health's scope and ambition. For the first time researchers are quantifying the relationships among transnational circuits of capital, associated shifts in agroecological landscapes, and the genetic evolution and spatial spread of a xenospecific pathogen.

Interactions between two naturalised invasive predators in Australia: are feral cats suppressed by dingoes?

Top-predators can play important roles in terrestrial food webs, fuelling speculation that top-predators might be used as biocontrol tools against invasive mesopredators. Feral cats are believed to be largely responsible for the current declines of native fauna across tropical northern Australia, where substantial beef cattle production occurs. Dingoes are known to impact cattle production there and are predicted to impact native fauna also. However, dingoes are forecasted to curtail the impacts of cats and reverse native fauna declines. We review (1) empirical studies investigating the relationships between dingoes and cats, and dingo control and cats, (2) records of cat remains in dingo diets, and (3) historical records of lethal dingo control using 1080-poisoned baits across Australia between 1999 and 2008 to show how two naturalised invasive species can interact in dynamic agro-ecological landscapes. From the 35 studies assessed, most reported no detectable relationship between dingoes and cats; negative or positive relationships were seldom detected. Dingoes do not appear to exclude cats beyond fine scales, but may alter cat activity periods under certain conditions. Cat remains were found in only 0.63 % of over 31,000 dingo diet records. Lethal dingo control occurs (in varying degrees) across about two-thirds of Australia and does not appear to substantially influence dingo-cat relationships. We conclude that the presently available data provides little evidence that bolstering dingo populations will reduce the impacts of cats. Much more work is needed to identify situations where top-predators might be used as effective biocontrol tools against invasive mesopredators in agro-ecological systems.

Impact of plant canopy structure on the transport of ecosystem entropy

The continuity of thermodynamic processes taking place in an ecosystem requires downloading incident solar radiation and converting into other forms of energy with simultaneous removal resulting entropy to the environment. For this reason, the struggle with the entropy production requires an adequate plant strategy, probably inherently involved in the biological activity of ecosystems. This hypothesis requires experimental verification.Aim of the work was to make the thermodynamic analysis of energy and entropy balance and exergy efficiency in the cycle of arable crops (forest island, winter wheat, sugar beet and bare soil) development based on the experimental data made in the Agroecological Landscape Park in Turew (West Polish Lowland). Determination of entropy production inside the plant canopy required drawing up a new approach by introducing a combination of experimental field data into the corresponding mathematical model based on the leaf area index (LAI).The studies preformed revealed the ratio of the entropy flux production on the top of ecosystem canopy to the entropy flux production after passage by the plant cover (entropy production density) as power function of the leaf area index (LAI) for all ecosystem's tested. An average value of fractal dimension calculated on the basis of the presented data suggests that DLA (diffusion limited by aggregation) determines the efficiency of entropy removal to the environment. In general, the agricultural landscape ecosystems develop in such a way that provides a systematic increase in their ability to dissipation the exergy taken. The architecture of plant canopy seems to be one of the parameters that control the functioning of ecosystem, due to its unique role in process of entropy removing into the environment.

The potential impact of second‐generation biofuel landscapes on at‐risk species in the US

AbstractThe recent increase in corn ethanol production has drawn attention to the environmental sustainability of biofuel production. Environmental assessments of second‐generation biofuel crops (SGBC) have focused primarily on greenhouse gas emissions and water quality. However, expanding the production of cellulosic biomass resources, especially those that require dedicated agricultural land, is also likely to have impacts on biodiversity. We developed an optimization framework for projecting the spatial pattern of SGBC expansion in the United States and intersected these predictions with occurrence data for at‐risk species. In particular, we focused on two candidate perennial grass feedstocks, Panicum virgatum (switchgrass), and Miscanthus × giganteus (Miscanthus). Tradeoffs between biodiversity and economic profitability are assessed using county level data sets of SGBC yield, agricultural land availability, land rents, and at‐risk species occurrences. Results show that future SGBC expansion is likely to occur outside of the Corn Belt, where conventional biofuel feedstocks are currently grown. The set of at‐risk species that could potentially be impacted is therefore likely to be different from the at‐risk species prevalent in the agroecological landscapes of the Upper Midwest that are dominated by corn and soy production. The total number and type of potentially impacted taxa is influenced by several factors, including the total demand for cellulosic biomass, the type of agricultural land used for production, and the method for defining at‐risk species. SGBC production is also concentrated in fewer counties when a national species conservation constraint is combined with a biofuel production mandate. This analysis provides a foundation for future research on species conservation in bioenergy production landscapes and highlights the importance of incorporating biodiversity into broader environmental assessments of biofuel sustainability.

Enhanced Processing of 1-km Spatial Resolution fAPAR Time Series for Sugarcane Yield Forecasting and Monitoring

A processing of remotely-sensed Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation (fAPAR) time series at 1-km spatial resolution is established to estimate sugarcane yield over the state of São Paulo, Brazil. It includes selecting adequate time series according to the signal spatial purity, using thermal time instead of calendar time and smoothing temporally the irregularly sampled observations. A systematic construction of various metrics and their capacity to predict yield is explored to identify the best performance, and see how timely the yield forecast can be made. The resulting dataset not only reveals a strong spatio-temporal structure, but is also capable of detecting both absolute changes in biomass accumulation and changes in its inter-annual variability. Sugarcane yield can thus be estimated with a RMSE of 1.5 t/ha (or 2%) without taking into account the strong linear trend in yield increase witnessed in the past decade. Including the trend reduces the error to 0.6 t/ha, correctly predicting whether the yield in a given year is above or below the trend in 90% of cases. The methodological framework presented here could be applied beyond the specific case of sugarcane in São Paulo, namely to other crops in other agro-ecological landscapes, to enhance current systems for monitoring agriculture or forecasting yield using remote sensing.

Iron forms and peroxidase activity in forest island soils

Oxidation-reduction reactions play a key role in ecologically important biogeochemical processes in soil and influence soil chemical, biochemical, and biological properties. The objective of this study was to compare the effect of a forest island located on two kinds of soils on the concentrations of iron forms and peroxidase activity participating in oxidation-reduction processes. The investigations were carried out in the Agroecological Landscape Park in Turew (40 km south of Poznan, Western Polish Lowland, 16°45'E, 52°01'N). The subject of the study was a palace park, which can be considered as a forest island. Part of this forest island is located on mineral soil and another part on mineral-organic soil. Our results showed that the flow of groundwater was accompanied by an increase in peroxidase activity, total iron concentration, and Fe(II) and Fe(III) ions in the mineral soils in most periods of sampling. However, an increase of peroxidase activity and a decrease of total iron concentration and Fe(II) and Fe(III) ions accompanying the flow of groundwater were observed in the mineral-organic soils.

Agricultural disease and insect-pest control via agro-ecological landscape construction

化学农药控制农田病虫害面临诸如农药残留、环境污染等问题, 而生物农药及生物防治存在着药效缓慢、成本高、防治对象单一等不足, 目前缺乏综合、效果明显、环境友好的农田病虫害控制手段。景观生态学研究显示, 致病菌、害虫及其天敌种群受到大尺度上景观格局的影响, 从而为病虫害控制提供了一条新的途径: 通过合理规划农业生态景观格局, 在景观尺度上合理安排种植结构和农事活动, 从而控制农田病虫害。本文从景观、田块、耕种管理措施3个层次上论述通过农业生态景观建设控制农业病虫害。景观上: 应提高半自然生境的面积比例; 丰富半自然生境类型和农田生境作物类型; 同时注意景观结构异质性的营建; 关注景观连接度, 使其保持在既有利于天敌昆虫的迁移、又能较好地阻止病虫害传播的水平上; 同时还应提升半自然生境斑块的质量。田块上: 通过保留原有的农田边界和新建农田植被缓冲带来控制相邻农田中的病虫害; 农田缓冲带的建设要与原有的半自然生境及农田边界构成一个整体, 建设过程中主要关注植被的搭配, 后期要特别注意杂草、割草、施肥、喷药等管理措施。耕种管理措施上: 通过景观层次上合理安排间套混作控制农田中的病虫害, 同时注重与农林间作, 稻田养鱼养鸭等技术体系和休耕、深耕、保护性耕作、有机肥施用等技术措施相结合。最后以哈尼梯田为例, 说明整合以上3个层次可构建综合控制病虫害的农业生态景观。

Do Species Sorting and Mass Effects Drive Assembly in Tropical Agroecological Landscape Mosaics?

AbstractRecent assessments of biodiversity in tropical agroecosystems have revealed surprisingly high functional and taxonomic diversity in systems with low management intensity. This biodiversity is the product of community assembly. Because agroecosystems are novel ecosystems and occur in landscape mosaics, the assembly processes generating communities in agroecosystems are poorly resolved. Broadly, two models have been proposed to explain landscape assembly: trade‐offs in species performance across habitats (species sorting) and source‐sink dynamics between habitats of differential quality (mass effects). These models are largely untested in tropical agroecosystems. We utilize an extensive data set on a tropical twig‐nesting ant community from five microhabitat types in a shaded coffee agroecosystem to test for species sorting, mass effects, or a mixed model. To test among these models, we used community similarity and a variance decomposition on a focal microhabitat (a moderate‐shade coffee farm) to partition community variance into spatial and environmental components. To identify the source habitat for mass effects and assess their strength, we measured dispersing alates (winged reproductives), artificial nests, and colony and nest size in shade trees and coffee. We found significant environmental and spatial signal and evidence for both species sorting and mass effects. We find sorting occurs among common species, but that mass effects are prevalent among rare species and likely originate in the shade trees. Our results indicate that both metacommunity models occur in tropical landscape mosaics, but they may not apply equally to all species in communities, habitat gradients, or timescales.

Identifying priority areas for reducing species vulnerability to climate change

AbstractAim The dimensions of species vulnerability to climate change are complex, and this impedes efforts to provide clear advice for conservation planning. In this study, we used a formal framework to assess species vulnerability to climate change quantifying exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity and then used this information to target areas for reducing vulnerability at a regional scale.Location The 6500‐km2 Mount Lofty Ranges region in South Australia.Methods We quantified the vulnerability of 171 plant species in a fragmented yet biologically important agro‐ecological landscape, typical of many temperate zones globally. We specified exposure, using three climate change scenarios; sensitivity, as the adverse impact of climate change on species’ spatial distribution; and adaptive capacity, as the ability of species to migrate calculated using dispersal kernels. Priority areas for reducing vulnerability were then identified by incorporating these various components into a single priority index.Results Climate change had a variable impact on species distributions. Those species whose range decreased or shifted geographically were attributed higher sensitivity than those species that increased geographic range or remained unchanged. The ability to adapt to range changes in response to shifting climates varies both spatially and between species. Areas of highest priority for reducing vulnerability were found at higher altitudes and lower latitudes with increasing severity of climate change.Main conclusions Our study demonstrates the use of a single spatially explicit index that identifies areas in the landscape for targeting specific conservation and restoration actions to reduce species vulnerability to climate change. Our index can be transferred to other regions around the world in which climate change poses an increasing threat to native species.

The Quadruple Squeeze: Defining the safe operating space for freshwater use to achieve a triply green revolution in the Anthropocene

Humanity has entered a new phase of sustainability challenges, the Anthropocene, in which human development has reached a scale where it affects vital planetary processes. Under the pressure from a quadruple squeeze—from population and development pressures, the anthropogenic climate crisis, the anthropogenic ecosystem crisis, and the risk of deleterious tipping points in the Earth system—the degrees of freedom for sustainable human exploitation of planet Earth are severely restrained. It is in this reality that a new green revolution in world food production needs to occur, to attain food security and human development over the coming decades. Global freshwater resources are, and will increasingly be, a fundamental limiting factor in feeding the world. Current water vulnerabilities in the regions in most need of large agricultural productivity improvements are projected to increase under the pressure from global environmental change. The sustainability challenge for world agriculture has to be set within the new global sustainability context. We present new proposed sustainability criteria for world agriculture, where world food production systems are transformed in order to allow humanity to stay within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries. In order to secure global resilience and thereby raise the chances of planet Earth to remain in the current desired state, conducive for human development on the long-term, these planetary boundaries need to be respected. This calls for a triply green revolution, which not only more than doubles food production in many regions of the world, but which also is environmentally sustainable, and invests in the untapped opportunities to use green water in rainfed agriculture as a key source of future productivity enhancement. To achieve such a global transformation of agriculture, there is a need for more innovative options for water interventions at the landscape scale, accounting for both green and blue water, as well as a new focus on cross-scale interactions, feed-backs and risks for unwanted regime shifts in the agro-ecological landscape.

Agriculture in North America on the Eve of Contact: A Reassessment

Abstract Despite countless archaeological excavations at prehistoric agricultural sites, understanding of the cultivation practices of native North Americans ca. 1492 remains imperfect, and regional syntheses of agricultural patterning elusive. The problem remains that excavations and surveys focus more on site function than on food production; more on the remains of plants than on cultivation practices; more on socioeconomic hypotheses than on human-environmental or spatial implications. This paper uses extensive ethno-historical accounts of early European explorers that help to identify five different types of agricultural methods in use during the Contact period. I argue that the agroecological landscapes of both the Southwest and Eastern Woodlands were quite complex, in response to mosaic environments, and that labor-intensive agriculture was as common in the East as in the Southwest. Subtleties in irrigation strategies were of equal if not greater importance than the obvious function of simply provid...

Paysages agro-écologiques et macrostructures dans les Llanos occidentaux du Venezuela

From Landsat data an example of agro-ecological landscapes and macrostructures cartography is documented showing a strong alluvial dynamics in the western Llanos of Venezuela : the Guanare region.

Identification and dynamics of agricultural environments in Northeast Thailand from landsat images (1972, 1976, 1982)

The objective of this research is to prepare a cartographic methodology to present agricultural environments and their dynamics from satellite data. Three Landsat images (October 1972, January 1976, January 1982) have been used and a field survey has been done in 1984. After interactive processing on TRIAS system of Institut Geographique National (IGN). Five colour maps have been produced: - a spatio-map with the new roads (1:250,000); - a map of the surface-states in 1982 (classified image) using a comparison with the two other dates for improvement (1:250,000); - a map of agro-ecological landscape units based on the combination between surface states showing interrelationships between agrarian systems and bio-physical environment (1:5000,000); - a map of the surface moisture seasonal variations to show the availability of water for the agriculture (1:400,000); - a map of changes in some agricultural environments components (1972–1982): water and flooded areas, agricultural areas, forests (1:500,000).

Inventaires agro-écologiques, paysages et télédétection en milieu tropical

Agro-ecological surveys, landscapes and remote sensing in tropical milieu. Methodological essay. — The concept of landscape, which reveals the many relationships existing between agrarian systems and the bio-physical environment, is a focal point of a methodology using digital remote sensing data for the study of the agricultural environment. Supervised radiometric classifications at one or several dates and image combining provide a map of the surface states on condition that the ground truth (training fields) is accurately marked on a good display of the image. This surface states map or classified image is processed in a second step by a textural analysis to get a regionalization in agro-ecological landscape units. These units are basic integrators of multispectral data for evaluating and monitoring the agricultural environment. By incorporating external data (topography, climate, geology...) one can delineate other spatial units (agro-ecological units) significant in debating the choice of crop systems and development, or setting up major agricultural development schemes at a smaller scale (agro-ecological map).

The Plantation Economy and Industrial Development in Latin America

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Plantation Economy and Industrial Development in Latin AmericaRuth C. YoungRuth C. Young Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 18, Number 3Apr., 1970 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/450437 Views: 30Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1970 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Esteli Jimenez-Soto The political ecology of shaded coffee plantations: conservation narratives and the everyday-lived-experience of farmworkers, The Journal of Peasant Studies 48, no.66 (Mar 2020): 1284–1303.https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2020.1713109Ivette Perfecto, M. Estelí Jiménez-Soto, and John Vandermeer Coffee Landscapes Shaping the Anthropocene: Forced Simplification on a Complex Agroecological Landscape, Current Anthropology 60, no.S20S20 (Jun 2019): S236–S250.https://doi.org/10.1086/703413Alec Gordon Towards a model of asian plantation systems, Journal of Contemporary Asia 31, no.33 (May 2007): 306–330.https://doi.org/10.1080/00472330180000191P. P. Courtenay The Plantation in Malaysian Economic Development, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 12, no.22 (Apr 2011): 329–348.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022463400009905William W. Goldsmith, Mario F. Rothschild The effect of regional specialization on local economic activity: A study of Chile, Papers of the Regional Science Association 32, no.11 (Dec 1974): 183–201.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01942299Norman T. Uphoff Ghana’s use of Economic Assistance, 1957–1966: A supradisciplinary analysis of development, Studies in Comparative International Development 7, no.33 (Sep 1972): 221–242.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03041092Joseph P. Farrell Educational differentiation and national development: A statistical study, Interchange 1, no.22 (Jun 1970): 62–76.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02214859