LTER: KBS - Ecological and Social Mechanisms of Resilience in Agroecosystems

Since 1989, scientists at the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research program have been studying the ecology of agricultural systems. This research would extend that research to 40-years while adding to our knowledge of how plants, insects, microbes, soils, and climate interact to shape agricultural landscapes. Importantly, in the US Midwest where corn and soy row crops predominate, farmers increasingly must deal with warmer temperatures and more frequent droughts.

This project will study how different farming and conservation practices affect agriculture’s ability to recover from these events. The past three decades of research has shown that some practices help crops recover from extreme weather better than others. For example, no-till farming and the planting of cover crops builds soil health, leading to more stable crop yields through drought.

This long term research will determine if improving soil health and biodiversity in agricultural landscapes can help farmers deal with a more unpredictable future. Experimental results will provide broader impacts through the dissemination of knowledge about carbon sequestration to stakeholders and policymakers. The use of prairie and other conservation areas to enhance ecosystem services will also provide broader impacts and the research will reduce barriers for underrepresented groups in STEM.

Resilience will be determined across a gradient of land use intensities, ranging from conventional agriculture, to perennial bioenergy cropping systems, to prairie and other natural areas. Long-term measurements spanning diverse organisms, biophysical resources, biogeochemical processes, and climatic factors will reveal linkages among ecosystem components that may be key to enhancing system-level resilience.

Three classes of mechanisms are identified that underlie agroecosystem resilience – resources, diversity, and adaptation. The overarching hypothesis in this proposal is that knowledge of these mechanisms enables the resilience of key ecosystem processes to be predicted at field, landscape, and regional scales. Specific hypotheses focus on: soil resources effects on water availability, carbon storage, and greenhouse gas emissions; on biodiversity effects of microbial and arthropod communities at plant and landscape scales; on evolutionary adaptation; and on farmer adaptation influenced by beliefs and values.

These hypotheses will be addressed with strategically designed experiments, including a large-scale rainfall manipulation, the introduction of perennial prairie strips within agricultural fields, and a farmer survey that will reach thousands of farmers across the US Midwest. Finally, scientists will introduce new tools to address how resilience scales across landscapes that will allow us to extrapolate site-specific measurements to the region.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.