Print PageTraditional research on grasslands, shrublands and savannas is increasingly irrelevant to land management. Future research must explicitly consider that many of these lands will cease to exist in their current state by the end of the century. Growing global demand for food, energy and water are already driving massive conversions to crop, and energy production. The rate and extent of these conversions is facilitated by private and public capital investments in what are frequently referred to as ‘marginal lands’. While the private sector is motivated by potential profits, governments increasingly recognize that national security increasingly depends on sustainable food and energy supplies. Even where land conversion is limited by social, political or environmental factors, research based on ideals of maintaining traditional livestock production systems must recognize that most of these systems already fail to sustain current rural populations. While improved land management may mitigate some of the resulting degradation, it is unlikely to keep up with population growth. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the strategies for increasing the relevance of ecology to the development and application of science-based management responses to revolutionary land and land use change.
Results/Conclusions
This paper provides an overview, and both US and international examples, of four successful strategies: (a) increased emphasis on understanding how ecological processes change across land cover types and production systems at patch to landscape scales, (b) use of a soil- and climate-based ecological potential framework (“ecological sites”) to prioritize research and apply knowledge generated in similar ecosystems throughout the world, (c) increased collaboration with social scientists, agronomists, civil engineers, soil scientists and other disciplines with expertise relevant to land use intensification, and (d) use of ecological site descriptions and synthetic ‘state and transition’ models to report research relevant to multiple land use systems.
