LTER: KBS - Mechanisms of Resilience in Agricultural Landscapes

农场覆盖了美国大部分地区，为全球市场提供食物、饲料和生物燃料。不断变化的天气模式和土地利用使为了利润和环境健康而管理农业用地变得更加困难。中西部农田作物的农民很快注意到，降雨模式的变化对他们的管理造成了严重破坏。中西部地区在作物生长季节的总体降雨量更多，但降雨也更大。气候科学家警告说，这种趋势很可能会持续下去，甚至会变得更糟，在这些暴雨之间，我们很可能会看到更多的干旱期。如何使农业景观在面对这些极端条件时更具弹性？凯洛格生物站长期生态研究项目的下一阶段将解决这个问题。科学家将探索环境的哪些方面（地上和地下）有助于农业景观抵御和从严重干旱中恢复，以及干旱影响如何与土地利用的变化相互作用。来自许多学科的科学家将共同努力，揭示植物、土壤、微生物、昆虫、时间和农民在为农业用地提供缓冲能力方面的作用。这项研究将集中在一年生大田作物、多年生草原和构成中西部大部分农业景观的自然区域。这些实验将为环境如何应对变化提供新的见解。这些发现将为世界各地的农业和自然环境的政策、计划和管理提供信息。将维持长期实验和观察，并辅以模拟生长季节干旱的新实验和在行作物田内增加草原带。新的实验将测试三类假设的恢复机制的重要性：资源可用性（土壤资源和社会资源）、多样性（包括物种丰富度和种内遗传多样性）和适应性（生物和技术）。通过研究我们空间域内每一种主要土地利用（一年生作物、多年生生物质作物、演替和保护用地）的恢复机制，研究人员将为理解土地利用和气候变化如何相互作用影响生态系统功能奠定基础。在项目过程中进行的农民调查将揭示管理者的决策如何适应环境变化，从而有助于恢复力。本研究独特地考察了农业系统和景观中恢复力的生物地球化学、生态、进化和社会维度。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Working farms cover much of the United States, providing food, feed, and biofuel to global markets. Changing weather patterns and land use are making it more difficult to manage agricultural lands for profit and environmental health. Midwestern field crop farmers are quick to note that changes in rainfall patterns are playing havoc with their management. The Midwest is experiencing more overall rainfall during the growing season, but it comes in heavier rain events. Climate scientists warn that this trend is likely to continue, or even get worse, and that we may well see more intense dry periods between these heavy rains. How can agricultural landscapes be made more resilient in the face of these extreme conditions? The next phase of the Kellogg Biological Station Long-term Ecological Research program tackles this question. Scientists will explore what aspects of the environment (above and belowground) help agricultural landscapes resist and recover from intense droughts and how drought effects interact with changes in land use. Scientists from many disciplines will work together to uncover the role of plants, soils, microbes, insects, time, and farmers in providing buffering capacity to agricultural lands. The research will focus on annual field crops, perennial grasslands, and natural areas that make up much of the agricultural landscape across the Midwest. The experiments will provide new insights into how environments respond to change. Discoveries will inform the policies, programs, and management of agricultural and natural environments across the world.Long-term experiments and observations will be maintained and complemented with new experiments that simulate growing-season droughts and add prairie strips within row crop fields. The new experiments will test the importance of three classes of hypothesized resilience mechanisms: resource availability (soil resources and social resources), diversity (including species richness and intraspecific genetic diversity), and adaptation (both biological and technological). By examining mechanisms of resilience in each major land use in our spatial domain - annual crops, perennial biomass crops, and successional and conservation lands - the researchers will lay the foundation for understanding how changing land use and climate will interact to affect ecosystem functions. Farmer surveys to be conducted over the course of the project will reveal how managers' decision-making adapts to environmental change and thereby contributes to resilience. This research uniquely examines biogeochemical, ecological, evolutionary, and social dimensions of resilience in agricultural systems and landscapes.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.