press release: Agriculture provides us with food and services that we depend on daily for healthy and prosperous lives. However, agriculture is also one of the most significant causes of global change. Our ability to create food, fiber, and more recently energy, to sustain our livelihoods has come at great environmental costs. The erosion of our soils, pollution and consumption of limited water supplies, and the loss of biological diversity threaten our ability to continue to farm. In Wisconsin, it is not even clear whether our current agricultural system is viable economically, as we lead the nation in farm foreclosures. The question of our generation is: how do we design agricultural systems that will be further pressed to provide more food to a growing global population in a way that supports healthier humans and the ecosystems on which they depend upon into the future? Based on our experiences studying the biological and ecosystem consequences of agriculture, we will discuss ways in which we can utilize the best science available to support a deliberate process of innovation that can lead to re-envisioning our agricultural landscapes. A portion of this session will include a hands-on workshop where participants will have the opportunity to collaboratively design alternative future landscapes.
About the speakers: Chris Kucharik is professor and chair in the Department of Agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also affiliated with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the Wisconsin Energy Institute. He is a member of the Working Groups Council for the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts (WICCI), and serves as chair for the WICCI Agriculture Working Group. His interdisciplinary research program combines ecosystem modeling with field work on plant physiology, eco-hydrology, and biogeochemical cycling to better understand the impacts of land management decision-making and a changing climate on the food-energy-water nexus. More specifically, the overall mission of his research group is to find ways to enhance the resiliency of ecosystems – and the services they provide – to drivers of global change.
Dr. Claudio Gratton has been on the faculty in the Entomology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2003. His research group works broadly on the landscape ecology of arthropods in managed and natural environments. He is particularly interested in the interconnections of habitats and ecosystems in the landscape. His research group has examined the role of unmanaged “non-crop” lands in the agricultural matrix and their effects on the abundance and diversity of beneficial insects including predators and pollinators and their effect on the provisioning of ecosystem services such as biological control and pollination in agricultural habitats. He has also worked on the connections between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Dr. Gratton received his BS in Biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1991) and his PhD in Entomology from the University of California – Berkeley (1997). At UW he teaches courses in Basic and Applied Insect Ecology, Agroecology, Field Ecology, and Multivariate Methods in Ecological research.
$15 | Free for Friends of ACG Members and UW Students (with ID)
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