Landscape diversity and sustainable agriculture production

Keywords: Landscape, diversity, sustainability, agriculture production
Session Type: Virtual Poster Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 62

Abstract

Biodiversity on the agriculture landscape provides below and above-ground ecosystem services considered as critical determinants of crop yields. While agriculture contributes to global biodiversity, it has caused a significant loss of it through increased landscape simplification and intensification. This has received scholarly attention in the past decades. In general, studies follow three approaches, (1) majority focused on only above-ground ecosystem services and crop yields (2) a few others considered only below ground ecosystem services, (3) more recent studies combined both above and below ground ecosystem services in non-linear models but mainly focused on regions within the USA and Europe. Yet, evidence shows that isolated examination of the effects of above and below-ground ecosystem effects on crop yield hinders the ability to accurately predict the combined and net effects of ecosystem services on yield. Here, we adopted a compiled global database consisting of above-ground ecosystem services, landscape composition, farm management practices at 1475 sampling sites published by Dainese et al. (2019). We then added data on climate variabilities and soil, where percent organic carbon and texture class were used as proxy indicators of below-ground ecosystem services. We used Gaussian linear regression and linear mixed-effects models that allow us to subset the data. Results show that precipitation and minimum temperature explain 10% and 2.3% of the variations in crop yields respectively. Landscape composition explains 96.9% and 79% of variations in crop yields. While landscape together with minimum temperature explained 97.3% of crop yield variations.