Agriculture disrupts all freshwater systems hugely from their pristine states. The former reductionist concept of pollution was of examining individual effects of particular substances on individual taxa or sub-communities in freshwater systems, an essentially ecotoxicological concept. It is now less useful than a more holistic approach that treats the impacts on the system as a whole and inclu...

Biodiversity is severely declining in intensively managed agriculture worldwide. In response, land-management strategies for biodiversity conservation on farmland are in debate, namely ecological intensification and land sparing vs. land sharing. In parallel, there is a recent food vs. energy debate stimulated by an increasing competition for land resources. Despite clear overlaps between these...

Movement of populations and languages in Eurasia has been mathematically modeled. The movements are explained by primarily demographic expansion caused by climatic change in the historic past, ecological factors and the introduction of agriculture from the Near East and Southeast Asia into the neighboring territories. This study use model outputs for the time period 120,000 BC-1,500 BC to inves...

Land use-land cover change and management practices influence earthworm species composition and abundance. The natural and agroecosystems under study in the Indogangetic region have a depauperate earthworm fauna. This study provides evidence that agriculture intensification and soil sodicity can severely influence earthworm diversity, in which natural and less disturbed ecosystems had lower ear...

Organophosphate pesticides are the ester forms of phosphoric acid usually considered as secure for agriculture uses due to their relatively fast degradation rates. Organophosphorus pesticides have been extensively used in the area of agriculture to manage insect or pests of a number of economically important crops. Organophosphate pesticides are well-known as the inhibitor of acetylcholinestera...

background: composition of dust in the air due to contact with human via inhalation, ingestion and skin absorption will have a large impact on public health. in the learning environments such as universities, many people spend most of their day in contact with the dust. the purpose of this study was to evaluate the concentration of heavy metals lead, chromium and copper in the training space of...

Ecological intensification (EI) could help return agriculture into a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity. Using novel application of meta-analysis to data from 30 long-term experiments Europe and Africa (comprising 25,565 yield records), we investigated how field-scale EI practices interact with each other, N fertilizer tillage, in their effects on crop yields. Here confirmed that (specifically...

This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity...