[...]... biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems Recent and Current Initiatives to Address Agricultural Biodiversity The importance to agriculture of crop, livestock, and aquatic genetic resources has long been recognized, but only in the last decade or so has the global community acknowledged the significance of the full range of agricultural biodiversity in the functioning of agricultural ecosystems In the international... prominent examples Many case studies carried out under these and other initiatives were reviewed at the international symposium Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Ecosystems, ” held in 2001 in Montreal on the margins of the meeting of the Scientific Subsidiary Body to the cbd This book builds on case studies presented at the Montreal symposium Whereas conventional approaches to agricultural biodiversity. .. custodians of most of the world’s agricultural biodiversity, farmers must be fully engaged in these efforts References Aarnink, W., S Bunning, L Collette, and P Mulvany, eds 1999 Sustaining Agricultural Biodiversity and Agro- Ecosystem Functions: Opportunities, Incentives and Approaches for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Agricultural Biodiversity in Agro- Ecosystems and Production Systems... in the linear sequence of nucleotides in dna Changes can occur in the sequence in the coding region of genes or in the spacer regions between and within genes Changes happen also in the number of copies of genes, the linkages of several genes, or indeed in whole chromosomes A fraction of these changes translates into protein variation, marker polymorphisms, characters, and morphological variation in. .. address agricultural biodiversity in the academic community and international policy fora, the multiple dimensions of biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems are surveyed Subsequent sections examine the value of ecosystems services provided by biodiversity, the functions of biodiversity, and how these are in uenced by management The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the future of biodiversity. .. improved varieties Inappropriate or excessive use of some inputs often reduces biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems (thus compromising future productivity) and in other ecosystems As many of the chapters of this book suggest, alternative approaches that make use of agricultural biodiversity to provide these ser vices can result in benefits for both productivity and biodiversity conservation In order to... sustain their livelihoods Biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems also contributes to generating other ecosystem services such as watershed protection and carbon sequestration Besides having this functional significance, maintenance of biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems may be considered important in its own right Indeed, the extent of agriculture is now so large, any strategy for biodiversity conservation... and indigenous and local communities to the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity and the importance of agricultural biodiversity to their livelihoods Within the framework of the convention’s program of work on agricultural biodiversity, specific initiatives on pollinators, soil biodiversity, and biodiversity for food and nutrition have been launched This new spotlight on agricultural. .. for tracking in time the movement of genes and populations Understanding relatedness helps in improving conservation decisions, developing core collections, searching for new characters such as new resistances, and choosing parents for plant breeding For example, a phylogeny of the alleles in wild barley samples at the Adh3 locus separates accessions into two distinct lineages, which according to the... families have led to new insights into species relationships and the origin of polyploidy lineages Diversity measures that incorporate distinctiveness can then be used to assess the effectiveness of a network of nature reserves in conserving the entire genepool of the subgenus For assessing diversity on farm, distinctiveness measures assist in pointing to areas that need survey and more intensive effort FUNCTIONAL . and Cooperation. Library of Congress Cata loging- in- Publication Data Managing biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems / edited by D. I. Jarvis, C. Padoch,. address agricultural biodiversity in the academic community and international policy fora, the multiple dimen- sions of biodiversity in agricultural ecosystems