Understanding resilience in agroecosystems: landscapes in transition

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Food, fiber, and biofuel production is one of the core ecosystem services provided by soils. However, soils also contribute to water purification, carbon sequestration, habitat for biodiversity, and nutrient cycling. Intensification of agriculture is being promoted as essential to increase food production for a growing global population. However, intensification has also been linked to widely publicized environmental issues surrounding water quality and quantity, greenhouse gas emissions, and reduced biodiversity. Among the most significant problems with intensification is reduced resiliency to change. Unfortunately, we do not have sufficient information to characterize the resiliency of key soil ecosystem services to change, particularly in Canadian agro-ecosystems. This lack of information presents a major obstacle to sustainable agriculture: How might soils respond to either a change in land use due to intensification, or to a change in temperature and precipitation patterns under global climate change? In particular, what might the net change in soil function be across the agricultural landscape?