Optimizing the Delivery of Multiple Ecosystem Goods and Services in Agricultural Systems
Optimizing the Delivery of Multiple Ecosystem Goods and Services in Agricultural Systems

Author: Maria A. Tsiafouli

Publisher: Frontiers Media SA

Published: 2017-10-18

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 2889452964

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Agricultural land is subjected to a variety of societal pressures, as demands for food, animal feed, and biomass production increase, with an added requirement to simultaneously maintain natural areas and mitigate climatic and environmental impacts. The biotic elements of agricultural systems interact with the abiotic environment to generate a number of ecosystem functions that offer services benefiting humans across many scales of time and space. The intensification of agriculture generally reduces biodiversity including that within soil, and impacts negatively upon a number of regulating and supporting ecosystem services. There is a global need toward achieving sustainable agricultural systems, as also highlighted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. There is hence a need for management regimes that enhance both agricultural production and the associated provision of multiple ecosystem services. The articles of this Research Topic enhance our knowledge of how management practices applied to agricultural systems affect the delivery of multiple ecosystem services and how trade-offs between provisioning, regulating, and supporting services can be handled both above- and below-ground. They also show the diversity of topics that need to be considered within the framework of ecosystem services delivered by agricultural systems, from knowledge on basic concepts and newly-proposed frameworks, to a focus on specific ecosystem types such as grasslands and high nature-value farmlands, pollinator habitats, and soil habitats. This diversity of topics indicates the need for broader-scope research, integrated with targeted scientific research to promote sustainable agricultural practices and to ensure food security.

Advances in Rice Research for Abiotic Stress Tolerance
Advances in Rice Research for Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Author: Mirza Hasanuzzaman

Publisher: Woodhead Publishing

Published: 2018-11-12

Total Pages: 988

ISBN-13: 0128143339

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Advances in Rice Research for Abiotic Stress Tolerance provides an important guide to recognizing, assessing and addressing the broad range of environmental factors that can inhibit rice yield. As a staple food for nearly half of the world's population, and in light of projected population growth, improving and increasing rice yield is imperative. This book presents current research on abiotic stresses including extreme temperature variance, drought, hypoxia, salinity, heavy metal, nutrient deficiency and toxicity stresses. Going further, it identifies a variety of approaches to alleviate the damaging effects and improving the stress tolerance of rice. Advances in Rice Research for Abiotic Stress Tolerance provides an important reference for those ensuring optimal yields from this globally important food crop. - Covers aspects of abiotic stress, from research, history, practical field problems faced by rice, and the possible remedies to the adverse effects of abiotic stresses - Provides practical insights into a wide range of management and crop improvement practices - Presents a valuable, single-volume sourcebook for rice scientists dealing with agronomy, physiology, molecular biology and biotechnology

Book of Abstracts of the 73rd Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science
Book of Abstracts of the 73rd Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science

Author: Scientific Committee

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2023-09-14

Total Pages: 760

ISBN-13: 9086869378

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Book of Abstracts is the main publication of the 73rd Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science (EAAP). It contains abstracts of the invited papers and contributed presentations of the sessions of EAAP's eleven Commissions: Animal Genetics, Animal Nutrition, Animal Management and Health, Animal Physiology, Cattle Production, Sheep and Goat Production, Pig Production, Horse Production and Livestock Farming Systems, Insects and Precision Livestock Farming.

Soil Ecology and Ecosystem Services
Soil Ecology and Ecosystem Services

Author: Diana H. Wall

Publisher:

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0199688168

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This multi-contributor, international volume synthesizes contributions from the world's leading soil scientists and ecologists, describing cutting-edge research that provides a basis for the maintenance of soil health and sustainability. The book covers these advances from a unique perspective of examining the ecosystem services produced by soil biota across different scales - from biotic interactions at microscales to communities functioning at regional and global scales. The book leads the user towards an understanding of how the sustainability of soils, biodiversity, and ecosystem services can be maintained and how humans, other animals, and ecosystems are dependent on living soils and ecosystem services. This is a valuable reference book for academic libraries and professional ecologists worldwide as a statement of progress in the broad field of soil ecology. It will also be of interest to both upper level undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in soil ecology, as well as academic researchers and professionals in the field requiring an authoritative, balanced, and up-to-date overview of this fast expanding topic.

Ecosystem Goods and Services from Plantation Forests
Ecosystem Goods and Services from Plantation Forests

Author: Jürgen Bauhus

Publisher: Earthscan

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1849776415

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Plantation forests often have a negative image. They are typically assumed to be poor substitutes for natural forests, particularly in terms of biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, provision of clean drinking water and other non-timber goods and services. Often they are monocultures that do not appear to invite people for recreation and other direct uses. Yet as this book clearly shows, they can play a vital role in the provision of ecosystem services, when compared to agriculture and other forms of land use or when natural forests have been degraded. This is the first book to examine explicitly the non-timber goods and services provided by plantation forests, including soil, water and biodiversity conservation, as well as carbon sequestration and the provision of local livelihoods. The authors show that, if we require a higher provision of ecosystem goods and services from both temperate and tropical plantations, new approaches to their management are required. These include policies, methods for valuing the services, the practices of small landholders, landscape approaches to optimise delivery of goods and services, and technical issues about how to achieve suitable solutions at the scale of forest stands. While providing original theoretical insights, the book also gives guidance for plantation managers, policy-makers, conservation practitioners and community advocates, who seek to promote or strengthen the multiple-use of forest plantations for improved benefits for society. Published with CIFOR

Sustainable Food Production
Sustainable Food Production

Author: Shahid Naeem

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 0231548443

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Industrial agriculture is responsible for widespread environmental degradation and undermines the pursuit of human well-being. With a projected global population of 10 billion by 2050, it is urgent for humanity to achieve a more sustainable approach to farming and food systems. This concise text offers an overview of the key issues in sustainable food production for all readers interested in the ecology and environmental impacts of agriculture. It details the ecological foundations of farming and food systems, showing how knowledge from the natural and social sciences can be used to create sustainable alternatives to the industrial production methods used today. Beginning with a discussion of the role of agriculture in human development, the primer examines how twentieth-century farming methods are environmentally and socially unsustainable, contributing to global change and perpetuating inequalities. The authors explain the principles of environmental sustainability and explore how these principles can be put into practice in agrifood systems. They emphasize the importance of human well-being and insist on the centrality of social and environmental equity and justice. Sustainable Food Production is a compelling guide to how we can improve our ability to feed each other today and preserve the ability of our planet to do so tomorrow. Appropriate for a range of courses in the natural and social sciences, it provides a comprehensive yet accessible framework for achieving agricultural sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Exploring and Optimizing Agricultural Landscapes
Exploring and Optimizing Agricultural Landscapes

Author: Lothar Mueller

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-06-14

Total Pages: 735

ISBN-13: 3030674487

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The book informs about agricultural landscapes, their features, functions and regulatory mechanisms. It characterizes agricultural production systems, trends of their development, and their impacts on the landscape. Agricultural landscapes are multifunctional systems, coupled with all nexus problems of the 21th century. This has led to serious discrepancies between agriculture and environment, and between urban and rural population. The mission, key topics and methods of research in order to understanding, monitoring and controlling processes in rural landscapes is being explained. Studies of international expert teams, many of them from Russia, demonstrate approaches towards both improving agricultural productivity and sustainability, and enhancing ecosystem services of agricultural landscapes. Scientists of different disciplines, decision makers, farmers and further informed people dealing with the evolvement of thriving rural landscapes are the primary audience of this book.

Numerical Ecology with R
Numerical Ecology with R

Author: Daniel Borcard

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 331971404X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This new edition of Numerical Ecology with R guides readers through an applied exploration of the major methods of multivariate data analysis, as seen through the eyes of three ecologists. It provides a bridge between a textbook of numerical ecology and the implementation of this discipline in the R language. The book begins by examining some exploratory approaches. It proceeds logically with the construction of the key building blocks of most methods, i.e. association measures and matrices, and then submits example data to three families of approaches: clustering, ordination and canonical ordination. The last two chapters make use of these methods to explore important and contemporary issues in ecology: the analysis of spatial structures and of community diversity. The aims of methods thus range from descriptive to explanatory and predictive and encompass a wide variety of approaches that should provide readers with an extensive toolbox that can address a wide palette of questions arising in contemporary multivariate ecological analysis. The second edition of this book features a complete revision to the R code and offers improved procedures and more diverse applications of the major methods. It also highlights important changes in the methods and expands upon topics such as multiple correspondence analysis, principal response curves and co-correspondence analysis. New features include the study of relationships between species traits and the environment, and community diversity analysis. This book is aimed at professional researchers, practitioners, graduate students and teachers in ecology, environmental science and engineering, and in related fields such as oceanography, molecular ecology, agriculture and soil science, who already have a background in general and multivariate statistics and wish to apply this knowledge to their data using the R language, as well as people willing to accompany their disciplinary learning with practical applications. People from other fields (e.g. geology, geography, paleoecology, phylogenetics, anthropology, the social and education sciences, etc.) may also benefit from the materials presented in this book. Users are invited to use this book as a teaching companion at the computer. All the necessary data files, the scripts used in the chapters, as well as extra R functions and packages written by the authors of the book, are available online (URL: http://adn.biol.umontreal.ca/~numericalecology/numecolR/).