AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT FOR IMPROVED SUSTAINABILITY: QUANTIFYING RELATIONSHIPS, BARRIERS AND OPPORTUNITIES

Our goal is to provide solutions for sustainable agriculture bycharacterizinghow and why landscape simplification affects ecosystem health and agricultural productivity,and by identifying barriers to landscape diversification. We will address this goal via three objectives.Objective 1 will employ Bayesian regression toquantify how landscape diversity relatesto crop production across theU.S., using a sensitivity analysis toquantifythe bounds of this relationship. Objective 2will integrate big geospatial datasetsof social, agricultural, biophysicaland landscape characteristics and employ hierarchical, random forestsand Bayesian modeling to identify potential reasons why the relationship between landscape diversity and crop production varies across regions. Objective 3 willaddress the need to understand how human decision-making impacts landscape diversification processes by collecting data viastakeholder interviewsandan electronicsurvey, andwillassess the viability of landscape diversification strategies usingfocus groups.This research willgenerateknowledge on the connections between a component of ecosystem health (landscape diversity), agricultural production, and human activitiesthat will enable development oflandscape diversificationstrategies that provide synergistic benefits for agricultural and ecological systems.