Plantation agriculture is more than 400 years old and contributes to the regional and national economies in many tropical countries. This paper reviews some of the main environmental issues related to plantation agriculture with perennial crops, including soil erosion, soil fertility decline, pollution, carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Soil erosion and soil fertility decline are of concer...

Replacing annual row crops with perennial grasses for bioenergy represents a landscape-level change in species composition, with the potential to impact annual soil nutrient removal on a regional scale. In this study we measured the concentration of ten essential nutrients in harvested material from three potential perennial bioenergy crops: Panicum virgatum L., Miscanthus giganteus, and a rees...

The advantages of using spatial analysis in annual crop experiments are well documented. There is much less evidence for perennial crops. For the sequence of measurements in perennial crops, apparently, there are no published articles in spatial analysis to date. This paper aimed at the comparison of several models, including auto-regressive, ante-dependence and character process models, in mod...

The choice of crops and their management can strongly influence soil microbial communities and their processes. We used lipid biomarker profiling to characterize how soil microbial composition of five potential bioenergy cropping systems diverged from a common baseline five years after they were established. The cropping systems we studied included an annual system (continuous no-till corn) and...

Perennial crop production is inherently dynamic due to several salient physical characteristics including an establishment period of several years, long lives in commercial production, and pathdependence of yields on input use and other exogenous factors such as weather. While perennial crop production is properly regarded as a dynamic investment under uncertainty, the literature on regional ag...

The USA’s federally funded Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has largely been successful in restoring many critical ecosystem functions to millions of acres through the conversion of vulnerable croplands to diverse perennial plant communities—primarily to perennial grass and forb plantings. CRP contracts, however, on as much as 6.5 million hectares (ha) are now expiring. Aside from leaving the...