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This volume presents a new theme of ecological networks in agricultural systems. Agriculture is the dominant human activity shaping the Earth's land surface. While agriculture provides many of the productivity services that facilitate our current human society, it also greatly impacts on the environment and may ultimately limit humanity's "safe operating space". Here, the editors have assembled a set of seminal papers that address these current and emerging topics in intensive agricultural systems. Given the diversity of agricultural systems and landscapes, the papers largely deal with concepts designed to unify our understanding of agriculture and the ecosystem goods and services delivered by it. This includes how we might join above- to below-ground agricultural networks and consolidate into networks the many interacting types of habitats that exist across agricultural landscapes. In the data papers, the editors also present our current best understanding of how to construct and test trophic networks, and predict for future changes in agricultural system perfomance.
- Networking Agroecology: Integrating the Diversity of Agroecosystem Interactions; David A. Bohan, Alan Raybould, Christian Mulder, Guy Woodward, Alireza Tamaddoni-Nezhad, Nico Bluthgen, Michael J.O. Pocock, Stephen Muggleton, Darren M. Evans, Julia Astegiano, François Massol, Nicolas Loeuille, Sandrine Petit and Sarina Macfadyen
- Connecting the Green and Brown Worlds: Allometric and Stoichiometric Predictability of Above- and Below-Ground Networks; Christian Mulder, Farshid S. Ahrestani, Michael Bahn, David A. Bohan, Michael Bonkowski, Bryan S. Griffiths, Rannveig Anna Guicharnaud, Jens Kattge, Paul Henning Krogh, Sandra Lavorel, Owen T. Lewis, Giorgio Mancinelli, Shahid Naeem, Josep Peñuelas, Hendrik Poorter, Peter B. Reich, Loreto Rossi, Graciela M. Rusch, Jordi Sardans and Ian J. Wright
- Empirically Characterising Trophic Networks: What Emerging DNA-Based Methods, Stable Isotope and Fatty Acid Analyses Can Offer; M. Traugott, S. Kamenova, L Ruess, J. Seeber and M. Plantegenest
- Construction and Validation of Food Webs using Logic-based Machine Learning and Text Mining; Alireza Tamaddoni-Nezhad, Ghazal Afroozi Milani, Alan Raybould, Stephen Muggleton and David A. Bohan
- Interaction Networks in Agricultural Landscape Mosaics; François Massol and Sandrine Petit
- Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics of Agricultural Networks: Implications for Sustainable Management; Nicolas Loeuille, Sébastien Barot, Ewen Georgelin, Grigorios Kylafis and Claire Lavigne
- Modelling Interaction Networks for Enhanced Ecosystem Services in Agroecosystems; Philippe Tixier, Nathalie Peyrard, Jean-Noël Aubertot, Sabrina Gaba, Julia Radoszycki, Geoffrey Caron-Lormier, Fabrice Vinatier, Grégory Mollot and Régis Sabbadin
Guy Woodward is Professor of Ecology in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and Series Editor for Advances in Ecological Research. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including recent papers in Nature, Science and Nature Climate Change, with a strong emphasis on understanding and predicting how aquatic ecosystems and food webs respond to a wide range of biotic and abiotic stressors, including climate change, chemical pollution, habitat degradation and invasive species. Much of this work covers multiple scales in space and time and also a range of organisational levels - from genes to ecosystems. His research group and ongoing collaborations span the natural and social sciences, reflecting the need for multidisciplinary approaches for addressing the environmental challenges of the 21st Century.
Dave Bohan is an agricultural ecologist with an interest in predator-prey regulation interactions. Dave uses a model system of a carabid beetle predator and two agriculturally important prey; slugs and weed seeds. He has shown that carabids find and consume slug prey, within fields, and that this leads to regulation of slug populations and interesting spatial 'waves' in slug and carabid density. The carabids also intercept weed seeds shed by weed plants before they enter the soil, and thus carabids can regulate the long-term store of seeds in the seedbank on national scales. What is interesting about this system is that it contains two important regulation ecosystem services delivered by one group of service providers, the carabids. This system therefore integrates, in miniature, many of the problems of interaction between services. Dave has most recently begun to work with networks. He developed, with colleagues, a learning methodology to build networks from sample date. This has produced the largest, replicated network in agriculture. One of his particular interests is how behaviours and dynamics at the species level, as studied using the carabid-slug-weed system, build across species and their interactions to the dynamics of networks at the ecosystem level.
