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1. A network approach for managing ecosystem services and improving food and nutrition security on smallholder farms

   https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10295  

   Timberlake, Thomas P. ; Cirtwill, Alyssa R. ; Baral, Sushil C. ; Bhusal, Daya R. ; Devkota, Kedar ; Harris‐Fry, Helen A. ; Kortsch, Susanne ; Myers, Samuel S. ; Roslin, Tomas ; Saville, Naomi M. ; et al ( January 2022 , People and Nature)

   Smallholder farmers are some of the poorest and most food insecure people on Earth. Their high nutritional and economic reliance on home‐grown produce makes them particularly vulnerable to environmental stressors such as pollinator loss or climate change which threaten agricultural productivity. Improving smallholder agriculture in a way that is environmentally sustainable and resilient to climate change is a key challenge of the 21st century.

   Ecological intensification, whereby ecosystem services are managed to increase agricultural productivity, is a promising solution for smallholders. However, smallholder farms are complex socio‐ecological systems with a range of social, ecological and environmental factors interacting to influence ecosystem service provisioning. To truly understand the functioning of a smallholder farm and identify the most effective management options to support household food and nutrition security, a holistic, systems‐based understanding is required.

   In this paper, we propose a network approach to understand, visualise and model the complex interactions occurring among wild species, crops and people on smallholder farms. Specifically, we demonstrate how networks may be used to (a) identify wild species with a key role in supporting, delivering or increasing the resilience of an ecosystem service; (b) quantify the value of an ecosystem service in a way that is relevant to the food and nutrition security of smallholders; and (c) understand the social interactions that influence the management of shared ecosystem services.

   Using a case study based on data from rural Nepal, we demonstrate how this framework can be used to connect wild plants, pollinators and crops to key nutrients consumed by humans. This allows us to quantify the nutritional value of an ecosystem service and identify the wild plants and pollinators involved in its provision, as well as providing a framework to predict the effects of environmental change on human nutrition.

   Our framework identifies mechanistic links between ecosystem services and the nutrients consumed by smallholder farmers and highlights social factors that may influence the management of these services. Applying this framework to smallholder farms in a range of socio‐ecological contexts may provide new, sustainable and equitable solutions to smallholder food and nutrition security.

   A freePlain Language Summarycan be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

    

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2. Local and landscape scale woodland cover and diversification of agroecological practices shape butterfly communities in tropical smallholder landscapes

   https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14446  

   Vogel, Cassandra ; Mayer, Vera ; Mkandawire, Mwapi ; Küstner, Georg ; Kerr, Rachel Bezner ; Krauss, Jochen ; Steffan‐Dewenter, Ingolf ( June 2023 , Journal of Applied Ecology)

   The conversion of biodiversity‐rich woodland to farmland and subsequent management has strong, often negative, impacts on biodiversity. In tropical smallholder agricultural landscapes, the impacts of agriculture on insect communities, both through habitat change and subsequent farmland management, is understudied. The use of agroecological practices has social and agronomic benefits for smallholders. Although ecological co‐benefits of agroecological practices are assumed, systematic empirical assessments of biodiversity effects of agroecological practices are missing, particularly in Africa.

   In Malawi, we assessed butterfly abundance, species richness, species assemblages and community life‐history traits on 24 paired woodland and smallholder‐managed farmland sites located across a gradient of woodland cover within a 1 km radius. We tested whether habitat type (woodland vs. farmland) and woodland cover at the landscape scale interactively shaped butterfly communities. Farms varied in the implementation of agroecological pest and soil management practices and flowering plant species richness.

   Farmland had lower butterfly abundances and approximately half the species richness than woodland. Farmland butterfly communities had, on average, a larger wingspan than woodland site communities. Surprisingly, higher woodland cover in the landscape had no effect on butterfly abundance in both habitats. In contrast, species richness was higher with higher woodland cover. Butterfly species assemblages were distinct between wood‐ and farmland and shifted across the woodland cover gradient.

   Farmland butterfly abundance, but not species richness, was higher with higher flowering plant species richness on farms. Farms with a higher number of agroecological pest management practices had a lower abundance of the dominant butterfly species, but not of rarer species. However, a larger number of agroecological soil management practices was associated with a higher abundance of rarer species.

   Synthesis and applications: We show that diversified agroecological soil practices and flowering plant richness enhanced butterfly abundance on farms. However, our results suggest that on‐farm measures cannot compensate for the negative effects of continued woodland conversion. Therefore, we call for more active protection of remaining African woodlands in tandem with promoting agroecological soil management practices and on‐farm flowering plant richness to conserve butterflies while benefiting smallholders.

    

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3. Advancing the integration of ecosystem services and livelihood adaptation

   https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab5519  

   King, Elizabeth G. ; Nelson, Donald R. ; McGreevy, John R. ( December 2019 , Environmental Research Letters)

   Around the world today, the magnitude and rates of environmental, social, and economic change are undermining the sustainability of many rural societies that rely directly on natural resources for their livelihoods. Sustainable development efforts seek to promote livelihood adaptations that enhance food security and reduce social-ecological vulnerability, but these efforts are hampered by the difficulty of understanding the complexity and dynamism of rural livelihood systems. Disparate research avenues are strengthening our ability to grapple with complexity. But we are only just beginning to find ways to simultaneously account for problematic complexities, including multiscalar feedbacks in the ecosystems that that support livelihoods, the heterogeneous benefits garnered by different segments of society, and the complex contingencies that constrain people’s decisions and capacities to adapt. To provide a more nuanced analysis of the dynamics of transformation in rural livelihood systems, we identified key complementarities between four different research approaches, enabling us to integrate them in a novel research framework that can guide empirical and modeling research on livelihood adaptation. The framework capitalizes upon parallel concepts of sequentiality in (1) ecosystem services and (2) livelihood adaptation scholarship, then incorporates principles from (3) adaptation in social-ecological systems research to account for the dynamism inherent in these often rapidly-transforming systems. Lastly, we include advances in (4) agent-based modeling, which couples human decisions and land use change and provides tools to incorporate complex social-ecological feedbacks in simulation studies of livelihood adaptation. Here we describe the new Ecosystem Services—Livelihood Adaptation (ESLA) framework, explain how it links the contributing approaches, and illustrate its application with two case studies. We offer guidance for its implementation in empirical and modeling research, and conclude with a discussion of current challenges in sustainability science and the contributions that could be gained through research guided by the ESLA framework.

    

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4. Global Marine Fishing across Space and Time

   https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114714  

   Carlson, Andrew K. ; Taylor, William W. ; Rubenstein, Daniel I. ; Levin, Simon A. ; Liu, Jianguo ( June 2020 , Sustainability)

   Human health and livelihoods are threatened by declining marine fisheries catches, causing substantial interest in the sources and dynamics of fishing. Catch analyses in individual exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the high seas are abundant, and research across multiple EEZs is growing. However, no previous studies have systematically compared catches, intranational versus international fish flows, and fishing nations within all of the world’s EEZs and across adjacent and distant EEZs and the high seas to inform “metacoupled” fisheries management. We use the metacoupling framework—a new approach for evaluating human–nature interactions within and across adjacent and distant systems (metacouplings)—to illustrate how fisheries catches were locally, regionally, and globally interconnected in 1950–2014, totaling 5.8 billion metric tons and increasing by 298% (tonnage) and 431% (monetary value) over this time period. Catches by nations in their own EEZs (largest in Peru) and adjacent EEZs (largest in Indonesia) constituted 86% of worldwide catches, growing in 1950–1996 but declining in 1997–2014. In contrast, catches in distant EEZs and the high seas—largest in Morocco, Mauritania, and Canada—peaked in 1973 and have since represented 9–21% of annual catches. Our 65-year, local–regional–global analysis illustrates how metacoupled fisheries governance—holistic management of multiscalar catches, flows, and tradeoffs within and among fisheries—can improve food and nutrition security, livelihood resilience, and biodiversity conservation across the world. 

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5. A comparative study of small-scale fishery supply chains’ vulnerability and resilience to COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-021-00231-4  

   Bassett, Hannah R. ; Sharan, Sonia ; Suri, Sharon K. ; Advani, Sahir ; Giordano, Christopher ( January 2022 , Maritime Studies)

   The COVID-19 pandemic and response has significantly disrupted fishery supply chains, creating shortages of essential foods and constraining livelihoods globally. Small-scale fisheries (SSFs) are responding to the pandemic in a variety of ways. Together, disruptions from and responses to COVID-19 illuminate existing vulnerabilities in the fish distribution paradigm and possible means of reducing system and actor sensitivity and exposure and increasing adaptive capacity. Integrating concepts from literature on supply chain disruptions, social-ecological systems, human wellbeing, vulnerability, and SSFs, we synthesize preliminary lessons from six case studies from Indonesia, the Philippines, Peru, Canada, and the United States. The SSF supply chains examined employ different distribution strategies and operate in different geographic, political, social, economic, and cultural contexts. Specifically, we ask (a) how resilient have different SSF supply chains been to COVID-19 impacts; (b) what do these initial outcomes indicate about the role of distribution strategies in determining the vulnerability of SSF supply chains to macroeconomic shocks; and (c) what key factors have shaped this vulnerability? Based on our findings, systemic changes that may reduce SSF vulnerability to future macroeconomic shocks include: diversification of distribution strategies, livelihoods, and products; development of local and domestic markets and distribution channels; reduced reliance on international markets; establishment of effective communication channels; and preparation for providing aid to directly assist supply chains and support consumer purchasing power.

    

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