Landscape complexity promotes ecosystem services and agricultural productivity, and often encompasses aspects of compositional or configurational land cover diversity across space. However, a key agricultural diversification practice, crop rotation, …
Mulching practice offers farmers an opportunity to minimize the effects of drought, water loss, and soil erosion on crop production. Plastic film is widely used as a mulching material; however, contamination of arable lands by residual plastic has …
Ecological theory on diversity suggests that agriculture requires sufficient biodiversity, ecological function, and critical ecosystem services to remain sustainable and resilient. As such, research related to the effect of ecosystem services and …
The county-level landscape complexity data built for our USDA Diversity of Agricultural Landscape project is now published and publicly available! You can access the data at AgDataCommons.
The suggested citation for those using the data is: Burchfield, Emily K.
Check out this pod-cast by our amazing Diversity of Agricultural Landscapes project post-doc (and now assistant professor at Arizona State University!) Andrea Rissing!
Prior research suggests that greater spatial diversity in crops and land use is associated with higher crop yields and improved ecosystem function. However, what leads to the emergence of agricultural systems that meet both productivity and …
Cropland expansion and agriculture intensification have been the primary methods to increase food production since the 19th century. The resulting landscape simplification, however, can impede long-term agricultural crop productivity. This paper …