Can diversity make agriculture more resilient to climate extremes?

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Project objective:

Agroforestry systems are increasingly becoming the focus of science and practice in terms of resilience to increasing weather extremes, as they increase the permanent provision of ecological niches for organisms living here and generally increase landscape resilience, i.e. the ability of a landscape to maintain or restore its basic qualities despite increasing stresses (heat, drought, heavy rainfall events, invasive species, etc.). The highest possible biodiversity is a decisive factor here, as many species in the agricultural landscape provide resilience-mediating ecosystem services.

With this in mind, a long-term agroforestry experiment consisting of walnut, hazelnut and currant in combination with arable crops was set up on the Hessian state domain of Frankenhausen, which is intensively farmed organically due to the good soil, in the fall of 2022 on a total of 17 ha. As part of ongoing research projects, butterflies and breeding birds will be mapped around the experiment in 2022, 2023 and 2024 and insects, including the pollen attached to them, will be identified.

With the help of the Future Foundation for Agriculture, the potential of intensive organic farming for the preservation of biodiversity and the associated landscape resilience will be described, among other things. In addition, future research will investigate whether the agroforestry system can further increase biodiversity, measured in terms of species numbers and population density of butterflies, breeding birds, arable wild herbs and insects, and thus make food webs more complex and thus more resilient, for example.

Runtime

07/2024 - 06/2025

 

Participants in FÖL

Other parties involved:

Prof. Dr. Birgit Gemeinholzer, Botany, Department 10, University of Kassel

Funding:

Future Foundation for Agriculture