Rapid evolution can increase or maintain the provision of ecosystem services, motivating the conservation of wild species and communities. We detail one such contemporary evosystem service by synthesizing theoretical evidence that rapid evolution can sustain parasiticide efficacy in salmon aquaculture, thus creating an added incentive for salmon conservation. Globally, wild and farmed salmon share native parasites: sea lice. In most major salmon farming areas sea lice have evolved resistance to parasiticides, but in the North Pacific, where farmed salmon coexist with large wild salmon populations, resistance has not emerged. We present a model to show that flow of susceptible genes from lice hosted on wild salmon to those hosted on farmed salmon can delay or preclude resistance. This theoretical and observational data suggests that wild salmon (both oceanic populations that function as a refuge and local migratory populations that connect this refuge to domesticated environments) provide an evosystem service by prolonging parasiticide efficacy. To preserve this service, aquaculture managers could avoid production quantities that exceed wild salmon abundances, and sustain wild salmon populations through regional and oceanic scale conservation. The evosystem service of resistance mitigation is one example of how a contemporary evolutionary process that benefits people can strengthen the case for conservation of intrinsically important wild species.
1. Agricultural producers, academics and policy-makers are increasingly interested in multifunctional tree crop systems as a solution for maintaining ecosystem services and producing food. The US Midwest is emerging as a hotbed of such systems in the temperate North in the form of farm-scale woody perennial polyculture enterprises, but they are currently only a tiny fraction of the landscape. Understanding how such approaches might be scaled up, thus, requires learning from the farmers that are at the forefront of the transition of land to woody perennial polyculture to answer a range of questions: What unique management knowledge is being implemented by farmers to manage complexity on multiple scales? What key challenges have farmers faced? And what values and motivations underpin these fledgling efforts? 2. From 13 interviews with 18 midwestern perennial polyculture farmers, we found that they largely used a small portion of their farm's land for their perennial enterprises, and did not earn a large portion of their income from them, though this was projected to increase as trees matured. Through experimentation, innovation and farmer networks, the farmers had amassed unique adaptive management expertise for balancing diverse crops and livestock within multifunctional tree crop systems over time and space, an area largely absent from mainstream agricultural science and policy. The barriers these farmers report facing are largely economic rather than biophysical, involving access to capital, insurance, mid-sized markets and regional processing infrastructure, as well as government programmes mismatched with perenniality.3. Cross-cutting these topics, farmers sought to fulfil values anchored in their relationships to land, to the community or to both. The values of long-termism, learning and sharing, diversity, stewardship and care of farmland, connection to nature and wildlife, self-sustenance, other-sustenance and eudaimonia were embodied and expressed in farmer decisions from the practical to the personal. 4. Economic and agrarian policy, as well as programme development for multifunctional tree crop systems, should (a) be designed to align with farmer's values and motivations and (b) take advantage of their expert management and systems | 181 People and Nature KREITZMAN ET Al.
Abstract:There is increasing recognition in academic circles of the importance of adaptive governance for the sustainability of social-ecological systems, but little examination of specific implications for the 34% of land-use where human activities are pervasive but potentially commensurate with functioning ecosystems: agricultural production systems. In this paper, we argue for the need to view food systems and agro-ecosystems as multi-scalar complex adaptive systems and identify five key challenging characteristics of such systems: multi-causality; cumulative impacts; regime shifts; teleconnections and mismatch of scales. These characteristics are necessary features of multi-scalar adaptive systems, and apply equally to social and natural subsystems. We discuss the implications of these characteristics for agricultural production systems and consider how governance can rise to these challenges. We present five case studies that highlight these issues: pollinator declines; payments for ecosystem services; pest control and pesticide resistance; downstream aquatic systems in Tasman Bay, New Zealand; and riparian buffers in Puget Sound, USA. From these case studies we derive recommendations for managing agricultural systems, both specific and general. Ultimately, adaptive governance of agro-ecosystems will likely hinge upon three paradigm shifts: viewing farmers and ranchers not only as food producers but also as land and water managers; seeking not yield maximization but rather resilient management of food ecosystems; and critically, as it transcends the production-system literature, engaging broad audiences not only as consumers but also citizens.
Staple crops, which have large amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and/or fats, provide the bulk of calories in people's diets. Perennial plants, which can be productive for many years without the need for replanting, can produce staple foods and environmental benefits, but their agronomic and nutritional properties haven't been considered synthetically in comparison to annual staples. Here we offer a framework to classify perennial staple crops according to their nutritional categories and cultivation status. We assemble literature to report on the yield potential of 51 perennial staple crops, only 15 of which are well-characterized in existing global datasets. We show the extent and distribution of perennial staple crop production in relation to annual crop types, calculate the carbon stocks they hold, and analyze their nutritional content for three macronutrients and nine micronutrients. We found that most perennial staple crops are regional crops (not globally traded) that grow in the subtropics to tropics. At least one perennial staple crop in each of the five nutritional categories has yields over 2.5 t/ha, in some cases considerably higher, competitive with and in many cases exceeding those of nutritionally comparable annual staples. Perennial staple crops only comprise ~4.5% of total cropland. They hold a modest ~11.4 GtC above and below ground, less than one third of the anthropogenic carbon-equivalent emissions for the year 2018, but more than the ~9 GtC held by the same amount of annual cropland. If linear growth in land under perennial staple production continues to 2040, and replaces only annual cropland, an additional ~0.95 GtC could be sequestered. Many perennial crops also had competitive macronutrient density and yield (per unit area) compared to annual staples; moreover, specific perennial staples are abundant in specific micronutrients, indicating that they can be a nutrient-dense part of diets, unlike the most ubiquitous annual staple crops (corn, wheat, rice) that do not appear in the top 85th percentile for any of the nine micronutrients analyzed. Transition of land and diets to perennial staple crops, if judiciously managed, can provide win-win solutions for both food production and ecosystems.
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