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Title:   Author  item
                                            LUCERO, M - New Mexico State Universityitem
                                            DEBOLD, S - University Of Kentuckyitem
                                            UNC, A - New Mexico State Universityitem
                                            RUIZ-FONT, A - National Polytechnic Instituteitem
                                            REYES, L - New Mexico State Universityitem
                                            MCCULLEY, R - University Of Kentuckyitem
                                            Alderman, Stephenitem
                                            Dinkins, Randyitem
                                            Barrow, Jerryitem
                                            Samac, Deborah

                                                         - *Debby*
  Submitted to: Book Chapter
                                    Publication Type: Book / Chapter
                                    Publication Acceptance Date: 7/25/2013
                                    Publication  Date: N/A
                                    Citation: N/AInterpretive Summary: Food insecurity and environmental degradation represent serious challenges facing agricultural production. In this chapter we describe strategies for addressing these challenges by restoring functional microbial communities to agroecosystems and  by utilizing comprehensive, interdisciplinary, cross-scale models of food systems to illustrate the immediate and long term, multi-scaled impacts of agricultural practices.
                                Technical Abstract: Innovative plant breeding and technology transfer fostered the Green Revolution, which transformed agriculture worldwide by increasing grain yields in developing countries.  The Green Revolution temporarily alleviated world hunger, but also reduced biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration that agricultural lands can provide.  Meanwhile, economic disparity and food insecurity within and among countries continues.  Subsequent agricultural advances, which have typically been focused on narrow objectives such as increasing crop yields or reducing the risk of a specific pest, have failed to meet local scale food demands or to restore lost ecosystem services.  Increasing human population, climate change, growing per capita food and energy demands, and reduced ecosystem potential to provide agriculturally relevant services have created an unrelenting need for improved crop production practices.  Meeting this need in a sustainable fashion will require interdisciplinary approaches that integrate plant and microbial ecology with efforts to advance crop production while mitigating effects of a changing climate.  

Metagenomic advances are revealing microbial dynamics that can simultaneously enhance crop production and soil restoration while enhancing crop resistance to environmental change.  Restoring microbial diversity to contemporary agroecosystems could restore lost ecosystem services while reducing production costs for large and small scale producers.  Our framework for examining plant-microbial interactions at multiple scales, modeling outcomes to broadly explore potential impacts, and interacting with extension and training networks to transfer microbial based agricultural technologies across socioeconomic scales, offers an integrated strategy for advancing agroecosystem sustainability while minimizing potential for the kind of negative ecological and socioeconomic feedbacks that have resulted from many widely adopted agricultural technologies.


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