The Future of Agricultural Landscapes, Part III

The Future of Agricultural Landscapes, Part III, Volume 65 in the Advances in Ecological Research serial, highlights new advances in the field, with this update including contributions from an international board of authors who cover Designing farmer-acceptable rotations that assure ecosystem service provision in the face of climate change, Building a shared vision of the future for multifunctional agricultural landscapes: Lessons from a Long Term Socio-Ecological Research site in south-western France, Vineyard landscapes and biocontrol, Pollinators, Next generation biomonitoring, Diversification of botanical resources in landscapes, Conflict resolution in agricultural landscapes, Addressing the Unanswered Questions in landscape-moderated biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and more.

• Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors
• Presents the latest release in the Advances in Ecological Research series
• Updated release includes the latest information on the Future of Agricultural Landscapes

Socio-ecosystems and conflict

1. Conflicts between agriculture and biodiversity conservation in Europe: Looking to the future by learning from the past

2. Building a shared vision of the future for multifunctional agricultural landscapes. Lessons from a long term socio-ecological research site in south-western France

Empirical needs

3. Broadening the scope of empirical studies to answer persistent questions in landscape-moderated effects on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning

4. Promoting crop pest control by plant diversification in agricultural landscapes: A conceptual framework for analysing feedback loops between agro-ecological and socio-economic effects

Global change

5. Designing farmer-acceptable rotations that assure ecosystem service provision in the face of climate change

6. Multiple global change impacts on parasitism and biocontrol services in future agricultural landscapes

7. Harnessing biodiversity and ecosystem services to safeguard multifunctional vineyard landscapes in a global change context

Monitoring

8. Effective biodiversity monitoring could be facilitated by networks of simple sensors and a shift to incentivising results

9. Coupling ecological network analysis with high-throughput sequencing-based surveys: Lessons from the Next-Generation Biomonitoring project

Dave Bohan is an agricultural ecologist with an interest in predator-prey regulation interactions. Dave uses a model system of a carabid beetle predator and two agriculturally important prey; slugs and weed seeds. He has shown that carabids find and consume slug prey, within fields, and that this leads to regulation of slug populations and interesting spatial 'waves' in slug and carabid density. The carabids also intercept weed seeds shed by weed plants before they enter the soil, and thus carabids can regulate the long-term store of seeds in the seedbank on national scales. What is interesting about this system is that it contains two important regulation ecosystem services delivered by one group of service providers, the carabids. This system therefore integrates, in miniature, many of the problems of interaction between services.

Dave has most recently begun to work with networks. He developed, with colleagues, a learning methodology to build networks from sample date. This has produced the largest, replicated network in agriculture. One of his particular interests is how behaviours and dynamics at the species level, as studied using the carabid-slug-weed system, build across species and their interactions to the dynamics of networks at the ecosystem level.
Dr Alex Dumbrell works at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, UK.