Against the odds: Network and institutional pathways enabling agricultural diversification

Farming systems that support locally diverse agricultural production and high levels of biodiversity are in rapid decline, despite evidence of their benefits for climate, environmental health, and food security. Yet, agricultural policies, financial incentives, and market concentration increasingly constrain the viability of diversified farming systems. Here, we present a conceptual framework to identify novel processes that promote the emergence and sustainability of diversified farming systems, using three real-world examples where farming communities have found pathways to diversification despite major structural constraints. By applying our framework to analyze these bright spots in the United States, Brazil, and Malawi, we identify two distinct pathways—network and institutional—to diversification. These pathways emerge through alignment of factors related to social and ecological structure (policies, institutions, and environmental conditions) and agency (values, collective action, and management decisions). We find that, when network and institutional pathways operate in tandem, the potential to scale up diversification across farms and landscapes increases substantially

Identification of Unmapped Special Flood Hazard Areas in Illinois

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) publishes Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs) depicting Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs), which have a 1 percent chance of being inundated in any given year. The Flood Insurance Act of 1968 initiated the nationwide identification of SFHAs. The Illinois Administrative Code (1994) defines state oversight of floodways for streams that drain 10 square miles (sq. mi.) or more in rural areas or 1 sq. mi. or more in urban or urbanizing areas. Floodways are the channel, including on-stream lakes, and the portion of the floodplain adjacent to a stream or watercourse, which is needed to store and convey the existing 100-year frequency flood discharge. If the flow is confined to the floodway, there would occur no more than a 0.1 foot increase in stage due to the loss of flood conveyance or storage, and no more than a 10 percent increase in velocities. Floodways are generally depicted on the FEMA FIRMs. This general guidance has been used when developing Illinois FIRMs to identify streams that pose a flood hazard. However, many SFHAs for streams meeting these criteria have not been identified on Illinois FIRMs. There are streams in rural and urban areas meeting the criteria for which SFHAs have never been identified, and there are urban areas where community annexation is expanding into locations mapped according to rural criteria. Unmapped SFHAs pose a flood risk, which has never been communicated to the public, floodplain managers, or elected officials. In order to bridge this gap in Illinois, a screening process was developed, and streams that have a potential flood risk for which SFHAs have not been mapped were identified for each Illinois County. This report contains maps of each of Illinois’ 102 counties illustrating stream reaches with potential flood risk for which SFHAs had not been identified on FEMA FIRMs as of July 1, 2007. Maps are accompanied by tabular data providing stream names and number of unmapped stream miles. The Federal Emergency Management Agency sponsored the initiative through the Map Modernization Management Support Best Practices Award for Federal Fiscal Year 2006, awarded to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources under Cooperating Technical Partner (CTP) Agreement EMC-2006-CA-7023.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Fern Laminar Scales Protect Against Photoinhibition from Excess Light

Volume: 96Start Page: 83End Page: 9

Training for beekeepers

Bees are a fundamental part of ecosystems. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, ensuring forest regeneration, sustainability and adaptation to climate change and improving the quantity and quality of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops producing fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality. Beekeeping, also called apiculture, refers to all activities concerned with the practical management of social bee species. Beekeeping is different from honey-hunting, which involves “plundering wild nests of honeybees to obtain crops of honey and beeswax”. For thousands of years, we have known that honey can be obtained much more easily and conveniently if bees are encouraged to nest inside a man-made hive (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2009). Depending on the type of hive and the species and subspecies of bee, it is also possible to manage the colony to some extent. In many rural areas of the world, beekeeping is a widespread activity, with thousands of small-scale beekeepers depending on bees for their livelihoods. Social bees can provide humans with valuable hive products (honey, wax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, queen bees and swarms) and services (pollination, apitherapy, apitourism and environmental monitoring) and play other important economic, cultural and social roles. Several species (and subspecies) of bee are kept across the world: in Europe, America and West Asia, Western honeybees are standard (Apis mellifera), while in East and South Asia, beekeepers keep the indigenous Eastern or Asiatic honeybee (Apis cerana). In the tropics, other species of social bee such as stingless bees (Melipona) are kept, mainly for honey production. Meanwhile, bumblebees (Bombus) are kept for their pollination services all over the world. Other species are kept in some areas (e.g. Apis dorsata and Apis laboriosa in Nepal and India, and Apis florea and Apis andreniformis in Southwest Asia).These guidelines aim to make beekeeping more sustainable by providing useful information and suggestions for proper management of bees around the world, which can then be applied to project development and implementation