Western Yolo Co. agricultural landscape (Source: A. Hollander)

Agricultural landscapes are mosaics of land use types and ownership. To increase environmental quality and biodiversity conservation, we need to understand both the ecological and socioeconomic factors involved in land management, and to work with various types of stakeholders in participatory projects to establish viable options for land use change. This is the theme of the international program of biodiversity science, DIVERSITAS ( http://www.diversitas-international.org/ ), for which L. Jackson co-chairs the agroBIODIVERSITY network with L. Brussaard at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. A science agenda for the network is available at http://www.diversitas-international.org/docs/Inter.%20Diversitas.pdf. In one of our landscape projects in California, the link between land use practices, soil biology, and vegetation was studied across a transect across various ecosystems on granite-derived alluvial soils in the Salinas and Carmel Valleys in the Central Coast region. The following land use types were included:

• Intensive irrigated production of vegetables such as lettuce and broccoli
• Non-irrigated, rainfed production of grain crops
• Annual grassland composed of non-native annual grasses
• Restored perennial grassland with native perennial bunchgrasses
• Relict perennial grassland with native perennial bunchgrassses

A new project has started to study the farmscape and landscape processes in western Yolo Co., California, where there is also a gradient from intensive agriculture to grazed upland grasslands. One focus is the use of biodiversity to supply ecosystem services for organic agriculture. The other focus is on farm edges, particularly wetland margins, and how to manage biodiversity to improve C storage, minimize greenhouse gas emissions and increase water quality. This project relies heavily on grower-cooperators in the region.