The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Agro-Ecological Zoning Atlas. Part 1: Agro-climatic indicators

Agriculture is crucial for the national economy of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Adoption of new strategies for agriculture monitoring, rural land use planning, and management are urgently required to reduce hunger and poverty and to assure sustainable food and feed production for future generations. The availability of reliable information on natural resources and agriculture for its monitoring and analysis is indispensable to the development and implementation of such strategies. For this purpose the project “Strengthening Afghanistan Institutions’ Capacity for the Assessment of Agriculture Production and Scenario Development” (GCP/AFG/087/EC), funded by the European Union (EU), is implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Within the context of this project, FAO and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) are developing a National Agro-Ecological Zoning activity (NAEZ) in Afghanistan. This Atlas is the first of two books and provides the collected information and maps of the country based on the agro-climatic Indicators

Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0

The Harmonized World Soil Database version 2.0 (HWSD v2.0) is a unique global soil inventory providing information on the morphological, chemical and physical properties of soils at approximately 1 km resolution. Its main objective is to be useful for modelers and to serve as a basis for prospective studies on agroecological zoning, food security and the impacts of climate change. HWSD v2.0 also serves an educational function, illustrating the geographical distribution of soils as well as their properties globally. HWSD v2.0 is easily accessible and user-friendly

Modeled spatial assessment of biomass productivity and technical potential of Miscanthus× giganteus, Panicum virgatum L. and Jatropha on marginal land in China

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was supported by Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). We thank our colleagues from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences for data collection, and thank Tao Sang from the Institute of Botany of Chinese Academy of Sciences for providing data. The MiscanFor modeling was supported by UK NERC ADVENT (NE/1806209) and FAB-GGR (NE/P019951/1) project funding. John Clifton-Brown received support from the United Kingdom's DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) as part of the MISCOMAR project (FACCE SURPLUS, Sustainable and Resilient Agriculture for food and non-food systems)Peer reviewedPublisher PD

When enough should be enough: Improving the use of current agricultural lands could meet production demands and spare natural habitats in Brazil

Providing food and other products to a growing human population while safeguarding natural ecosystems and the provision of their services is a significant scientific, social and political challenge. With food demand likely to double over the next four decades, anthropization is already driving climate change and is the principal force behind species extinction, among other environmental impacts. The sustainable intensification of production on current agricultural lands has been suggested as a key solution to the competition for land between agriculture and natural ecosystems. However, few investigations have shown the extent to which these lands can meet projected demands while considering biophysical constraints. Here we investigate the improved use of existing agricultural lands and present insights into avoiding future competition for land. We focus on Brazil, a country projected to experience the largest increase in agricultural production over the next four decades and the richest nation in terrestrial carbon and biodiversity. Using various models and climatic datasets, we produced the first estimate of the carrying capacity of Brazil's 115 million hectares of cultivated pasturelands. We then investigated if the improved use of cultivated pasturelands would free enough land for the expansion of meat, crops, wood and biofuel, respecting biophysical constraints (i.e., terrain, climate) and including climate change impacts. We found that the current productivity of Brazilian cultivated pasturelands is 32–34% of its potential and that increasing productivity to 49–52% of the potential would suffice to meet demands for meat, crops, wood products and biofuels until at least 2040, without further conversion of natural ecosystems. As a result up to 14.3 Gt CO2 Eq could be mitigated. The fact that the country poised to undergo the largest expansion of agricultural production over the coming decades can do so without further conversion of natural habitats provokes the question whether the same can be true in other regional contexts and, ultimately, at the global scale

New generation of hydraulic pedotransfer functions for Europe

A range of continental-scale soil datasets exists in Europe with different spatial representation and based on different principles. We developed comprehensive pedotransfer functions (PTFs) for applications principally on spatial datasets with continental coverage. The PTF development included the prediction of soil water retention at various matric potentials and prediction of parameters to characterize soil moisture retention and the hydraulic conductivity curve (MRC and HCC) of European soils. We developed PTFs with a hierarchical approach, determined by the input requirements. The PTFs were derived by using three statistical methods: (i) linear regression where there were quantitative input variables, (ii) a regression tree for qualitative, quantitative and mixed types of information and (iii) mean statistics of developer-defined soil groups (class PTF) when only qualitative input parameters were available. Data of the recently established European Hydropedological Data Inventory (EU-HYDI), which holds the most comprehensive geographical and thematic coverage of hydro-pedological data in Europe, were used to train and test the PTFs. The applied modelling techniques and the EU-HYDI allowed the development of hydraulic PTFs that are more reliable and applicable for a greater variety of input parameters than those previously available for Europe. Therefore the new set of PTFs offers tailored advanced tools for a wide range of applications in the continent

Model comparison and quantification of nitrous oxide emission and mitigation potential from maize and wheat fields at a global scale

This work was carried out by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in collaboration with farmers and funded by the CGIAR research programs (CRPs) on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). CCAFS' work is supported by CGIAR Fund Donors and through bilateral funding agreements. For details, please visit https://ccafs.cgiar.org/donors. The views expressed in this paper cannot be taken to reflect the official opinions of these organizations. The dataset associated with this manuscript will be available together with the supplementary materials of this manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

High-resolution spatial modelling of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change to energy crops in the United Kingdom

Funded by Energy Technologies Institute EPSRC-Supergen. Grant Number: EP/M013200/1Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Pollination and biological control research: are we neglecting two billion smallholders

Food insecurity is a major world problem, with ca. 870 million people in the world being chronically undernourished. Most of these people live in tropical, developing regions and rely on smallholder farming for food security. Solving the problem of food insecurity is thought to depend, in part, on managing ecosystem services, such as the pollination of crops and the biological control of crop pests, to enhance or maintain food production. Our knowledge regarding regulating ecosystem services in smallholder-farmed (or dualistic) landscapes is limited and whilst pollination has been the focus of considerable research, the provision of natural enemy services, important for every crop worldwide, has been relatively neglected. In order to assess whether ecosystem-service research adequately represents smallholder-farmed landscapes, whilst also considering climatic region and national economic status, we examined the constituent studies of recent quantitative reviews relevant to biological control and pollination. No regulating ecosystem service meta-analysis, to our knowledge, has focussed on smallholder agriculture despite its importance to billions of peoples’ local food security. We found that whilst smallholdings contributed 16% of global farmland area and 83% of the global agricultural population (estimated using FAO’s World Census of Agriculture 2000) only 22 of 190 studies (12%), overall, came from smallholder-farmed landscapes. These smallholder studies mostly concerned coffee production (16 studies). Individual reviews of biological control were significantly and strongly biased towards data from large-scale farming in temperate regions. In contrast pollination reviews included more smallholder studies and were more balanced for climate regions. The high diversity of smallholder-farmed landscapes implies that more research will be needed to understand them compared to large-scale landscapes but we found far more research from the latter. We highlight that these skews in research effort have implications for sustainable intensification and the food security of billions in the developing world. In particular we urge for balance in future ecosystem-services research and synthesis by greater consideration of a diverse range of smallholder-farmed landscapes in Africa and continental Asia