Human Behaviour and Ecosystem Services in Sustainable Farming Landscapes PDF Download

Author: Eléonore E. Guillem
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309252423
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 136

View

Book Description
Natural environments provide enormously valuable, but largely unappreciated, services that aid humans and other earthlings. It is becoming clear that these life-support systems are faltering and failing worldwide due to human actions that disrupt nature's ability to do its beneficial work. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability documents the National Academies' Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Ecosystem Services. At this conference, participants were divided into 14 interdisciplinary research teams to explore diverse challenges at the interface of science, engineering, and medicine. The teams needed to address the challenge of communicating and working together from a diversity of expertise and perspectives as they attempted to solve a complicated, interdisciplinary problem in a relatively short time. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability describes how ecosystem services scientists work to document the direct and indirect links between humanity's well-being and the many benefits provided by the natural systems we occupy. This report explains the specific topics the interdisciplinary research teams addressed at the conference, including the following: -how ecosystem services affect infectious and chronic diseases -how to identify what resources can be produced renewably or recovered by developing intense technologies that can be applied on a massive scale -how to develop social and technical capabilities to respond to abrupt changes in ecosystem services -how to design agricultural and aquacultural systems that provide food security while maintaining the full set of ecosystem services needed from landscapes and seascapes -how to design production systems for ecosystem services that improve human outcomes related to food and nutrition -how to develop appropriate methods to accurately value natural capital and ecosystem services -how to design a federal policy to maintain or improve natural capital and ecosystem services within the United States, including measuring and documenting the effectiveness of the policy -how to design a system for international trade that accounts for impacts on ecosystem services -how to develop a program that increases the American public's appreciation of the basic principles of ecosystem services

Author: Atampugre, Gerald
Publisher: IWMI
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description
The report proposes a framework for assessing the sustainability of social-ecological landscapes (SEL) to be used by the West and Central African Food Systems Transformation (TAFS-WCA) initiative for research, planning, and implementation of its Work Package 3 (WP3). It builds on existing assessment frameworks from relevant fields (e.g., Eco agriculture, Agroecology, Integrated Landscape Management, etc.). At the center of a Sustainable Social-Ecological Landscape (SSEL) is the improvement of the management of land and the natural resource base in such a way that land use concurrently meets three goals: (i) provision of products (e.g., food) and services on a sustainable basis, (ii) support for sustainable livelihoods for all social groups and (iii) conservation of the full complement of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Globally, SSEL related approaches like eco-agriculture, agroecology, and landscape approaches are already being applied, with promising results, especially in places where food production, poverty alleviation, and conservation of biodiversity, water, and ecosystem services are all high priorities. However, a comprehensive framework for measuring/monitoring landscape status and performance vis-a-vis competing landscape uses and management interventions has not been given much priority in the literature. Different forms of land use, such as forestry, agriculture, extraction of minerals, conservation/protected areas, and settlements, are interdependent. Therefore, landscape performance and monitoring frameworks that focus exclusively on protecting natural resources or the intensification of agriculture and other land uses can only give an incomplete viewpoint/overview of landscapes with all their uses and stakeholders. Considering the SSEL goals above, a holistic conceptual framework for landscape-based assessment is needed; such a framework must consider the drivers and effects of land use and the individual management interventions as well as the complex interactions among different land uses and interventions across the landscape. The present study proposes the Drivers-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) framework for SEL. It is important to emphasize that this study recognizes that different individuals and organizations under the TAFS-WCA initiative may have different interests in understanding the status and performance of selected SELs. The research envisages two important applications of a framework for measuring and understanding SEL: i) it can facilitate inclusive decision-making by multiple stakeholders working in the same landscape by explaining interactions, synergies, and trade-offs among SSEL goals and landscape components, and ii) when SSEL-related management innovations are successful (or otherwise), the framework can help document the same, reinforcing the case for adopting and scaling up innovations.

Author:
Publisher: Academic Press
ISBN: 0128231130
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description
Advances in Ecological Research, Part Two, Volume 64, the latest release in this ongoing series, includes specific chapters on Tropical Ecosystems in the 21st Century. Chapters in this volume cover topics such as landscape-scale expansion of agroecology to enhance natural pest control, a systematic review and ecosystem services, and the resilience of agricultural landscapes. Provides information that relates to a thorough understanding of the field of ecology Deals with topical and important reviews on the physiologies, populations and communities of plants and animals

Author: Gilles Lemaire
Publisher: CABI
ISBN: 9781845939007
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 287

View

Book Description
Grassland ecosystems are deeply affected by human activities and need appropriate management to optimise trade-offs between ecosystem functions and services. Until now they have mainly been analysed as agro-ecosystems for animal production but this book looks beyond the role of grassland as a feeding ground, and evaluates other important processes such as carbon sequestration in soils, greenhouse gas regulation and biodiversity protection. This authoritative volume expertly highlights the need for an immediate balance between agriculture and ecological management for sustainability in the futu.

Author: Mark Everard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1848139640
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 226

View

Book Description
Common Ground explores the shifting relationship between human society and the landscapes that bear it. Examining the changing understandings of the natural world and its management and exploitation, environmental activist Mark Everard presents solutions in the nature of ecosystem services. Notwithstanding our total dependence on the Earth's natural resources, the relationship between humanity and the land has shifted significantly and frequently throughout our tenure, brief as it is relative to the evolution of planetary life. Appropriating increasing proportions of nature's resources to meet our shifting and growing demands, we have been degrading the quality and extent of ecosystems, nearly destroying their capacities to meet the needs of a burgeoning population. The book offers a fresh and vital whole-system approach to the key under-pinning the issue of sustainability. Everard looks ahead to what is required to live sustainably, respecting the central role of landscapes in supporting human wellbeing into the long-term future.

Author: Robert K. Swihart
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 9781557533272
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 366

View

Book Description
Habitat loss and fragmentation arguably pose the greatest threats to biological diversity. Agriculture is a dominant land use that, along with urban sprawl and residential development, can reduce the amount and connectedness of natural areas required by many native species. Unfortunately, progress has been slow in integrating nature and biodiversity protection into community planning in intensively farmed regions, especially in America's heartland. Seldom do issues related to species conservation receive consideration during local planning activities. Lack of progress stems partly from scientific inadequacies in understanding the dynamics of complex landscapes, and from a lack of engagement of non-scientific stakeholders by scientists and modelers. The result of these shortcomings is a critical disconnect of conservation issues from the planning infrastructure. This book provides a blueprint for advancing conceptual understanding of conservation in agricultural regions. It accomplishes this with a two-pronged approach: first, by developing spatially structured models that acknowledge the link between socio-economic drivers of land-use change and the dynamics of species occupying agricultural landscapes with abrupt changes in land cover (i.e., sharp edges); and second, by providing guidelines and examples to enable scientists to effectively engage stakeholders in participatory learning and planning activities that integrate biodiversity with other, more traditional, considerations. The structure of the book is truly interdisciplinary, linking the efforts of ecologists, economists, statisticians, mathematicians, and land-use specialists.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ecosystem services
Languages : en
Pages : 121

View

Book Description

Author: Joseph Alcamo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biodiversity
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being is the first product of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year international work program designed to meet the needs of decisionmakers for scientific information on the links between ecosystem change and human well-being. The book offers an overview of the project, describing the conceptual framework that is being used, defining its scope, and providing a baseline of understanding that all participants need to move forward. The Millennium Assessment focuses on how humans have altered ecosystems, and how changes in ecosystem services have affected human well-being, how ecosystem changes may affect people in future decades, and what types of responses can be adopted at local, national, or global scales to improve ecosystem management and thereby contribute to human well-being and poverty alleviation. The program was launched by United National Secretary-General Kofi Annan in June 2001, and the primary assessment reports will be released by Island Press in 2005. Leading scientists from more than 100 nations are conducting the assessment, which can aid countries, regions, or companies by: providing a clear, scientific picture of the current sta

Author: Interdisciplinary Research Team Summaries; Conference, Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center, Irvine, California, November 10-11, 2011
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309252423
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 117

View

Book Description
Natural environments provide enormously valuable, but largely unappreciated, services that aid humans and other earthlings. It is becoming clear that these life-support systems are faltering and failing worldwide due to human actions that disrupt nature's ability to do its beneficial work. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability documents the National Academies' Keck Futures Initiative Conference on Ecosystem Services. At this conference, participants were divided into 14 interdisciplinary research teams to explore diverse challenges at the interface of science, engineering, and medicine. The teams needed to address the challenge of communicating and working together from a diversity of expertise and perspectives as they attempted to solve a complicated, interdisciplinary problem in a relatively short time. Ecosystem Services: Charting a Path to Sustainability describes how ecosystem services scientists work to document the direct and indirect links between humanity's well-being and the many benefits provided by the natural systems we occupy. This report explains the specific topics the interdisciplinary research teams addressed at the conference, including the following: -how ecosystem services affect infectious and chronic diseases -how to identify what resources can be produced renewably or recovered by developing intense technologies that can be applied on a massive scale -how to develop social and technical capabilities to respond to abrupt changes in ecosystem services -how to design agricultural and aquacultural systems that provide food security while maintaining the full set of ecosystem services needed from landscapes and seascapes -how to design production systems for ecosystem services that improve human outcomes related to food and nutrition -how to develop appropriate methods to accurately value natural capital and ecosystem services -how to design a federal policy to maintain or improve natural capital and ecosystem services within the United States, including measuring and documenting the effectiveness of the policy -how to design a system for international trade that accounts for impacts on ecosystem services -how to develop a program that increases the American public's appreciation of the basic principles of ecosystem services