In an age of accelerating biodiversity loss, this timely and critical volume summarizes recent advances in biodiversity-ecosystem functioning research and explores the economics of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The book starts by summarizing the development of the basic science and provides a meta-analysis that quantitatively tests several biodiversity and ecosystem functioning hypotheses. It then describes the natural science foundations of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research including: quantifying functional diversity, the development of the field into a predictive science, the effects of stability and complexity, methods to quantify mechanisms by which diversity affects functioning, the importance of trophic structure, microbial ecology, and spatial dynamics. Finally, the book takes research on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning further than it has ever gone into the human dimension, describing the most pressing environmental challenges that face humanity and the effects of diversity on: climate change mitigation, restoration of degraded habitats, managed ecosystems, pollination, disease, and biological invasions.However, what makes this volume truly unique are the chapters that consider the economic perspective. These include a synthesis of the economics of ecosystem services and biodiversity, and the options open to policy-makers to address the failure of markets to account for the loss of ecosystem services; an examination of the challenges of valuing ecosystem services and, hence, to understanding the human consequences of decisions that neglect these services; and an examination of the ways in which economists are currently incorporating biodiversity and ecosystem functioning research into decision models for the conservation and management of biodiversity. A final section describes new advances in ecoinformatics that will help transform this field into a globally predictive science, and summarizes the advancements and future directions of the field. The ultimate conclusion is that biodiversity is an essential element of any strategy for sustainable development.

Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Human Wellbeing: An Ecological and Economic Perspective

The following bibliography is conceived as a selection of international literature on food as heritage and as a marker of identity within the huge amount of works recently produced on the topic of food. The bibliography has been produced within the “Food as heritage” project, performed at University of Bologna and coordinated by Ilaria Porciani, with a team composed by Massimo Montanari, Paolo Capuzzo, Raffaele Laudani and Marica Tolomelli. “Food as heritage” is part of a wider projec...

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Bibliography “Food as Heritage”

Biodiversity and multiple ecosystem functions in an organic farmscape.

Potential declines in native pollinator communities and increased reliance on pollinator-dependent crops have raised concerns about native pollinator conservation and dispersal across human-altered landscapes. Bumble bees are one of the most effective native pollinators and are often the first to be extirpated in human-altered habitats, yet little is known about how bumble bees move across fine spatial scales and what landscapes promote or limit their gene flow. In this study, we examine regional genetic differentiation and fine-scale relatedness patterns of the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, to investigate how current and historic habitat composition impact gene flow. We conducted our study across a landscape mosaic of natural, agricultural and urban/suburban habitats, and we show that B. vosnesenskii exhibits low but significant levels of differentiation across the study system (F(ST) = 0.019, D(est) = 0.049). Most importantly, we reveal significant relationships between pairwise F(ST) and resistance models created from contemporary land use maps. Specifically, B. vosnesenskii gene flow is most limited by commercial, industrial and transportation-related impervious cover. Finally, our fine-scale analysis reveals significant but declining relatedness between individuals at the 1-9 km spatial scale, most likely due to local queen dispersal. Overall, our results indicate that B. vosnesenskii exhibits considerable local dispersal and that regional gene flow is significantly limited by impervious cover associated with urbanization.

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Urban land use limits regional bumble bee gene flow.

To examine management options for biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, eight research regions were classified into social-ecological domains, using a dataset of indicators of livelihood resources, i.e., capital assets. Potential interventions for biodiversity-based agriculture were then compared among landscapes and domains. The approach combined literature review with expert judgment by researchers working in each landscape. Each landscape was described for land use, rural livelihoods and attitudes of social actors toward biodiversity and intensification of agriculture. Principal components analysis of 40 indicators of natural, human, social, financial and physical capital for the eight landscapes showed a loss of biodiversity associated with high-input agricultural intensification. High levels of natural capital (e.g. indicators of wildland biodiversity conservation and agrobiodiversity for human needs) were positively associated with indicators of human capital, including knowledge of the flora and fauna and knowledge sharing among farmers. Three social-ecological domains were identified across the eight landscapes (Tropical Agriculture-Forest Matrix, Tropical Degrading Agroecosystem, and Temperate High-Input Commodity Agriculture) using hierarchical clustering of the indicator values. Each domain shared a set of interventions for biodiversity-based agriculture and ecological intensification that could also increase food security in the impoverished landscapes. Implementation of interventions differed greatly among the landscapes, e.g. financial capital for new farming practices in the Intensive Agriculture domain vs. developing market value chains in the other domains. This exploratory study suggests that indicators of knowledge systems should receive greater emphasis in the monitoring of biodiversity and ecosystem services, and that inventories of assets at the landscape level can inform adaptive management of agrobiodiversity-based interventions.

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Social-ecological and regional adaptation of agrobiodiversity management across a global set of research regions

California's climate and geography divide the state into a number of diverse and productive subregions, each with its own specialty crops, economy and cultural identity. Yet, ever since journalist Carey McWilliams coined the phrase "factories in the field", students of California agriculture have largely characterized speciality crop growers in monolithic terms - as people devoid of any ideology or culture except the desire to cut costs and maximize profits. In the early years, every grower was not in fact like every other, David Vaught argues, whether one examines their labour systems, recruiting methodds, harvest needs, marketing strategies, farm size, or their relationships with their communites, unions and the state. In this work, Vaught shows how fruit and nut growers were neither industrialists nor agrarians. From the outset, he explains, these "horticulturalists" saw themselves as guardians of California's unique culture - raising crops for market while self-consciously building healthy and prosperous communities. The hard work, foresight and devotion to detail required to nurture an orchard or vineyard made them, they insisted, cultivators of a better society. This heightened self-image gained credence as California became synonymous, in the minds of millions of Americans, with fresh fruit and produce. Over time, Vaught concludes, labour relations, seasonal and other pressures beyond their control, the vagaries of distant markets and their own racial ambivalence undermined the growers' horticultural ideal.

Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920

The raisin situation... is more than a private business question. The welfare of this whole community is so bound up in the prosperity of the raisin business, and the progress of that business is so dependent on organized and more or less public action, that raisin affairs have always been treated, and properly treated, as public affairs.... The raisin industry, in this community, can not be treated, and never has been treated, as "business" in that narrowly private sense. Chester Rowell

Factories in the Field Revisited

After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

State of the art-rural history, or why is there no rural history of california?

In the 1850s and 1860s, prior to California's bonanza wheat era, a prominent agricultural community emerged along Putah Creek in the lower Sacramento Valley. This was a community of considerable stability, despite being settled by displaced 49 ers—speculators, squatters, and “swamplanders”—on a fraudulent Mexican land grant. Capitalist and traditional values, imported from the Midwest, sustained them.

http://whq.oxfordjournals.org/content/whq/34/4/446.full.pdf

David Vaught

Papers

Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920

Factories in the Field Revisited

After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley

State of the art-rural history, or why is there no rural history of california?

After the Gold Rush: Replicating the Rural Midwest in the Sacramento Valley