Conventional agriculture offers farmers few choices about which crops to grow or how to raise them. A new approach uses computing to construct better strategies with lower environmental impacts.
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Articles on Monoculture
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Farms have become less friendly for our insect friends – this must be reversed if we want food to eat.
The optimal trade-off between restoring habitat and crop production hinges on pollinators. A new study shows giving pollinators more natural habitat on the farm leads to big increases in production.
Over hundreds of million years of evolution, ants have come up with some pretty smart solutions to problems of agriculture, navigation and architecture. People could learn a thing or two.
Huge single-crop fields attract bees in such numbers that they spread parasites to one another. Planting diverse mixes of flowers around fields helps spread out pollinators and keep them healthy.
Up to 85% of the nectar available to pollinating insects in a city comes from gardens. What we plant – whether in an allotment or a window box – can make a huge difference.
Forests provide an essential buffer between people and wildlife — and the viruses they carry. Global agriculture is destroying forests, harming biodiversity and may be putting human life at risk.
As much as one-third of animal species in the tropics could be eradicated if their habitats continue to be converted for monoculture farming. We can all do something to make a difference.
Every single Cavendish banana plant worldwide is genetically identical. This vast monoculture sets them up for disastrous disease outbreaks. But researchers have ideas on how to protect the crop.
Modern agriculture is synonymous with monoculture. That lack of diversity is bad news for plants’ natural immune defenses. Researchers are figuring out how to help plants fend off microbes – without pesticides.
Continued use of pesticides will lower diversity of beneficial insects, costing corn farmers more money over time.
Top contributors
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Researcher in Conservation Decision Science and Land Use, University of Oxford
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Professor of Economics, South Dakota State University
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Research Entomologist, South Dakota State University
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Ph.D. Student in the School of Plant and Environmental Science, Virginia Tech
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Senior Lecturer in Spatial Sciences and ARC DECRA Fellow, The University of Melbourne
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Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology, University of California, Davis
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Professor of Agriculture and Food Sciences, The University of Queensland
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Special Professor of Phytopathology, Wageningen University
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Professor of Ecology, University of Bristol
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Associate Professor in Ecology, Northumbria University, Newcastle
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Associate Teaching Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Rice University
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Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Melbourne
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Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia
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PhD Candidate in Community Ecology, University of Bristol
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Extension Agent, University of Florida
