Ecology in agricultural landscapes: Seeking solutions for food, water, wildlife

Agriculture alters the landscape more than any other human activity, with trickle-down effects on water, soil, climate, plant and wildlife diversity, wildfire, and human health. Crop and rangeland occupies nearly 40 percent of earth's ice-free land, and mountains and deserts make much of the remaining surface unwelcoming to agriculture. Our increasing population applies constant pressure for further conversion of wild lands to agricultural production. With yields plateauing in many parts of the world, managers, both private and public, are looking for new ideas to get the most out of agricultural lands, sustain production into the future, and protect natural resources.

Multiple sessions will address the ecological study of agricultural systems at the Ecological Society of America's 98th Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, August 4 – 9.

Presenting scientists will examine routes to improved soil, water, and nutrient retention, pollinator support, and pest suppression by natural enemies. They will discuss opportunities to increase biodiversity in agricultural areas and mitigate runoff.

Land sharing

Organized Oral Session 23: Bridging The Public-Private Land Divide - Supporting Biodiversity Conservation and Ecosystem Services By Tapping The Ingenuity In Social-Ecological Systems.

Thursday, August 8, 2013: 8:00 AM-11:30 AM, room 101A

For much of the world, high-intensity industrial farming produces food with high efficiency, but puts the squeeze on other plant and animal life. Wildlife is mostly sequestered on preserves. But is this the best way to maximize food and biodiversity? Or are there other configurations that might improve mobility of wildlife and benefit other ecosystem services without cost (and possibly with benefit) to private land owners?

"We are probably not going to be able to achieve landscape conservation goals for soil, water, and wildlife, specifically grasslands and birds, working on publically-owned lands alone. We will need to incorporate private lands," said session moderator Chris Woodson, a private lands biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Missouri. Conservation biologists are looking for conservation-supportive practices that have potential to augment protected areas on public lands and aid existing programs. Private landowners and entrepreneurs are looking for contributions that they can make to conservation and still make a living.

This session brings together managers, scientists, private land owners, and entrepreneurs to discuss ideas, pilot projects, and existing public-private partnerships, and seek areas of mission overlap and opportunities for collective action.

"Lower case c conservation is what we want to see happen," said session co-organizer Paul Charland, a wildland firefighter with the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Capital C Conservation is official business; it's the movement as an organizational process. Lower case conservation is all efforts to keep native species. We want to provide a mechanism for everyone to do that."

Organizers: Patrica Heglund; Paul Charland; Carol Williams; Chris Woodson

Connecting the global to the local – agricultural landscapes from field to orbit

Symposium 20: Integrating Agro-Ecological Research Across Spatial and Temporal Scales

Thursday, August 8, 2013: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM

Big changes in agriculture are visible on the global scale – changes in crop yields, dietary choices, water use, fertilizer application, soil retention, and nutrient pollution. In some parts of the world, yield lags, revealing opportunities to get more out of land already in production. In others, crop production has sagged or plateaued. Will yields keep increasing as they have in the past? It's hard to see trajectories without local context, said session organizer Kate Brauman of the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. Site-specific field work fills in details.

"Agronomy has been working very successfully for a long time, and it's been focused on practitioners," said Brauman. "And global analysis can be hard for someone in the field to interpret. How can we take insights from the local to the global scale and make them useful?" Ecology has great scientists studying the very local, applied art and science of getting more yield out of our crops and the local ecological effects of agriculture, and great scientists studying global trends, said Bauman. It does not have much of a history of cross-pollination between the groups. This session aims to bridge gulfs of scientific culture and of scale, connecting the satellite's eye view of global change to the view from the field; computational modeling to on-the-ground experimentation; and snapshot observations to daily, seasonal, annual, and decadal change.

Organizer: Kate Brauman

Resilient future

Two "Ignite" sessions offer a series of 5-minute introductions to ideas for the future interdependency of conservation and agriculture, from plant breeding and field design, to farm policy.

• IGN 1: Realizing a Resilient Food System Tuesday, August 6, 2013: 8:00 AM-10:00 AM.
• IGN 5: Complementarity Considers Ecological Principles to Create Sustainable Pathways Tuesday, August 6, 2013: 1:30 PM-3:30 PM.

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Provided by Ecological Society of America