Positive effects of intercrop yields in farms from across Europe depend on rainfall, crop composition, and management

\ua9 The Author(s) 2024.Modern “intensive” agriculture drives the biodiversity-climate crisis but is also central to global food security. Future farming needs management approaches that maintain (or even enhance) food production while reducing negative climate and biodiversity impacts. Intercrops could provide part of the solution, increasing biodiversity and boosting production with fewer inputs. However, barriers remain to their wide-scale uptake, in particular tailoring intercrops to local equipment, management practice, and environment. We analyze data from multiple trials of cereal-legume intercrops conducted on farms across Europe between 2018 and 2021. Our study is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to quantify the yield benefits of cereal-legume intercropping undertaken at commercially relevant scales for farms across Europe. We used crop performance ratio (CPR)—the ratio of the observed intercrop yield compared to the expected yield based on monoculture yields—as our metric of intercrop performance. Using CPR, we found a roughly 30% yield gain across all sites. However, CPR was modulated by a number of factors. CPR was not strongly affected by management except for the negative effects of direct drilling and the positive effects of organic fertilizer addition. CPR also depended on intercrop composition (number and identity of components), background yields (being highest where yields were lower), and rainfall (being higher with higher rainfall). Our findings allow us to reduce uncertainty about how intercrops will perform in realistic local farm conditions, give guidance for tailoring intercrops to local farming conditions, and provide key goals for further work to integrate intercrops into sustainable farming systems

City Know-How

CITY KNOW-HOW: Human health and planetary health are influenced by city lifestyles, city leadership, and city development. For both, worrying trends are leading to increasing concern and it is imperative that human health and environmental impacts become core foci in urban policy. Changing trajectory will require concerted action; the journal Cities & Health is dedicated to supporting the flow of knowledge, in all directions, to help make this happen. We wish to foster communication between researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, communities, and decision-makers in cities. This is the purpose of the City Know-how section of the journal. ‘Research for city practice’ disseminates lessons from research by explaining key messages for city leaders, communities, and the professions involved in city policy and practice. ‘City shorts’ provide glimpses of what is being attempted or achieved ‘on the ground’ and ’case studies’ are where you will find evaluations of interventions. Last, ‘Commentary and debate’ extends conversations we are having to develop and mobilize much needed new thinking. Join in these conversations. In order to strengthen the community of interest, we would like to include many and varied voices, including those from younger practitioners and researchers who are supporting health and health equity in everyday urban lives

Quantifying soil hydrology to explain the development of vegetation at an ex-arable wetland restoration site

Wetland restoration frequently sets well-defined vegetation targets, but where restoration occurs on highly degraded land such targets are not practical and setting looser targets may be more appropriate. Where this more ‘open-ended’ approach to restoration is adopted, surveillance methods that can track developing wetland habitats need to be established. Water regime and soil structure are known to influence the distribution and composition of developing wetland vegetation, and may be quantified using Sum Exceedence Values (SEV), calculated using the position of the water table and knowledge of soil stress thresholds. Use of SEV to explain patterns in naturally colonizing vegetation on restored, ex-arable land was tested at Wicken Fen (UK). Analysis of values from ten locations showed that soil structure was highly heterogeneous. Five locations had shallow aeration stress thresholds and so had the potential to support diverse wetland assemblages. Deep aeration stress thresholds at other locations precluded the establishment of a diverse wetland flora, but identified areas where species-poor wetland assemblages may develop. SEV was found to be a useful tool for the surveillance of sites where restoration targets are not specified in detail at the outset and may help predict likely habitat outcomes at sites using an open-ended restoration approach

Maintaining ecosystem resilience: functional responses of tree cavity nesters to logging in temperate forests of the Americas

Logging often reduces taxonomic diversity in forest communities, but little is known about how this biodiversity loss affects the resilience of ecosystem functions. We examined how partial logging and clearcutting of temperate forests influenced functional diversity of birds that nest in tree cavities. We used point-counts in a before-after-control-impact design to examine the effects of logging on the value, range, and density of functional traits in bird communities in Canada (21 species) and Chile (16 species). Clearcutting, but not partial logging, reduced diversity in both systems. The effect was much more pronounced in Chile, where logging operations removed critical nesting resources (large decaying trees), than in Canada, where decaying aspen Populus tremuloides were retained on site. In Chile, logging was accompanied by declines in species richness, functional richness (amount of functional niche occupied by species), community-weighted body mass (average mass, weighted by species densities), and functional divergence (degree of maximization of divergence in occupied functional niche). In Canada, clearcutting did not affect species richness but nevertheless reduced functional richness and community-weighted body mass. Although some cavity-nesting birds can persist under intensive logging operations, their ecosystem functions may be severely compromised unless future nest trees can be retained on logged sites.Fil: Ibarra, José Tomás. University of British Columbia; Canadá. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Martin, Michaela. University of British Columbia; CanadáFil: Cockle, Kristina Louise. University of British Columbia; Canadá. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Salta. Instituto de Bio y Geociencias del NOA. Universidad Nacional de Salta. Facultad de Ciencias Naturales. Museo de Ciencias Naturales. Instituto de Bio y Geociencias del NOA; ArgentinaFil: Martin, Kathy. University of British Columbia; Canad

Root traits explain plant species distributions along climatic gradients yet challenge the nature of ecological trade-offs

Ecological theory is built on trade-offs, where trait differences among species evolved as adaptations to different environments. Trade-offs are often assumed to be bidirectional, where opposite ends of a gradient in trait values confer advantages in different environments. However, unidirectional benefits could be widespread if extreme trait values confer advantages at one end of an environmental gradient, whereas a wide range of trait values are equally beneficial at the other end. Here, we show that root traits explain species occurrences along broad gradients of temperature and water availability, but model predictions only resembled trade-offs in two out of 24 models. Forest species with low specific root length and high root tissue density (RTD) were more likely to occur in warm climates but species with high specific root length and low RTD were more likely to occur in cold climates. Unidirectional benefits were more prevalent than trade-offs: for example, species with large-diameter roots and high RTD were more commonly associated with dry climates, but species with the opposite trait values were not associated with wet climates. Directional selection for traits consistently occurred in cold or dry climates, whereas a diversity of root trait values were equally viable in warm or wet climates. Explicit integration of unidirectional benefits into ecological theory is needed to advance our understanding of the consequences of trait variation on species responses to environmental change.</p

TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Model parameterization to simulate and compare the PAR absorption potential of two competing plant species

Mountain pastures dominated by the pasture grass Setaria sphacelata in the Andes of southern Ecuador are heavily infested by southern bracken (Pteridium arachnoideum), a major problem for pasture management. Field observations suggest that bracken might outcompete the grass due to its competitive strength with regard to the absorption of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR). To understand the PAR absorption potential of both species, the aims of the current paper are to (1) parameterize a radiation scheme of a two-big-leaf model by deriving structural (LAI, leaf angle parameter) and optical (leaf albedo, transmittance) plant traits for average individuals from field surveys, (2) to initialize the properly parameterized radiation scheme with realistic global irradiation conditions of the Rio San Francisco Valley in the Andes of southern Ecuador, and (3) to compare the PAR absorption capabilities of both species under typical local weather conditions. Field data show that bracken reveals a slightly higher average leaf area index (LAI) and more horizontally oriented leaves in comparison to Setaria. Spectrometer measurements reveal that bracken and Setaria are characterized by a similar average leaf absorptance. Simulations with the average diurnal course of incoming solar radiation (1998–2005) and the mean leaf–sun geometry reveal that PAR absorption is fairly equal for both species. However, the comparison of typical clear and overcast days show that two parameters, (1) the relation of incoming diffuse and direct irradiance, and (2) the leaf–sun geometry play a major role for PAR absorption in the two-big-leaf approach: Under cloudy sky conditions (mainly diffuse irradiance), PAR absorption is slightly higher for Setaria while under clear sky conditions (mainly direct irradiance), the average bracken individual is characterized by a higher PAR absorption potential. (∼74 MJ m−2 year−1). The latter situation which occurs if the maximum daily irradiance exceeds 615 W m−2 is mainly due to the nearly orthogonal incidence of the direct solar beam onto the horizontally oriented frond area which implies a high amount of direct PAR absorption during the noon maximum of direct irradiance. Such situations of solar irradiance favoring a higher PAR absorptance of bracken occur in ∼36% of the observation period (1998–2005). By considering the annual course of PAR irradiance in the San Francisco Valley, the clear advantage of bracken on clear days (36% of all days) is completely compensated by the slight but more frequent advantage of Setaria under overcast conditions (64% of all days). This means that neither bracken nor Setaria show a distinct advantage in PAR absorption capability under the current climatic conditions of the study area