Preventive and/or manipulative practices will be needed to maintain soil's biological, physiochemical, nutritional, and structural health in natural, managed, and disturbed ecosystems as a foundation for food security and global ecosystem sustainability. While there is a substantial body of interdisciplinary science on understanding function and structure of soil ecosystems, key gaps must be br...

Nitrate is a key component of synthetic fertilizers that can be beneficial to crop production in agro-ecosystems, but can also cause damage to natural ecosystems if it is exported in large amounts. Stable isotopes, both oxygen and nitrogen, have been used to trace the sources and fate of nitrate in various ecosystems. However, the oxygen isotope composition of synthetic and organic nitrates is ...

The world population is estimated to be 9.2 billion in 2050. To sufficiently feed these people, the total food production will have to increase 60% 70%. Climate models predict that warmer temperatures and increases in the frequency and duration of drought during the present century will have negative impact on agricultural productivity. These new global challenges require a more complex integra...

The extensive use of chemical pesticides for pest management in agricultural systems can entail risks to the complex ecosystems consisting of economic, ecological and social subsystems. To analyze the negative and positive effects of external or internal disturbances on complex ecosystems, we proposed an ecological two-sidedness approach which has been applied to the design of pest-controlling ...

Wild terrestrial birds can act as potential local spreaders or bridge hosts for avian influenza viruses (AIVs) between waterfowl (the maintenance hosts of AIVs) and domestic avian populations in which AIVs may cause disease. Few studies have investigated this hypothesis, although it is an important knowledge gap in our understanding of AIV spread within socio-ecosystems. We designed a simple an...

Food security is the pillar of nutritional wellbeing for food availability, and necessary to satisfy all physiological needs thus maintain general populations. However, global agricultural deficiencies occur due rapid population growth, causing an increase in competition resources; such as water, land, energy, leading overexploitation agro-ecosystems, inability produce a suitable quantity effic...