Journal of Sustainable Agriculture and Environment最新文献

Crop production and food security will be challenged by the availability of phosphate rock and its derived phosphorus (P) fertilizers in the coming decades. Croplands around the world have traditionally received huge amounts of P fertilizers. However, P can quickly become unavailable in soil due to its fast adsorption or fixation on the surface of soil particles. Here, we propose the use of microbially mediated mechanisms of soil-borne populations to solubilize historically accumulated P over years. We argue that microbially mediated solubilization of P can be enhanced through elemental imbalances that intentionally alter the soil carbon:nitrogen:P ratio, enabling a greater P demand by some soil microbial populations. This strategy may potentially reduce our dependence on conventional and exhausting P fertilizers, but the main caveats are also discussed.

Agriculture needs to develop novel strategies and practices to meet the increasing global food demand, in an ecological and economical sustainable framework. The plant-associated microbiota is gaining increasing attention as part of these strategies since it strongly contributes to plant health, nutrition, and resilience to environmental perturbations. However, plant domestication has brought to the reduction of the plant abilities to recruit a beneficial microbiota. It is becoming clear that successful use of the plant microbiota requires a multifaceted approach where microbiologist, geneticists, plant scientists, agronomists, and computational biologists can develop ways and solutions to modify both the plant microbiota and plant's ability to recruit it, directed to increase crop performances. Here, while briefly reviewing the state-of-the-art in plant microbiota research, we focus the attention on the need to discover, understand and use the microbiota associated with wild relatives of crops and with neglected crops, which harbour the microbiota biodiversity needed for developing efficient bioinoculant solutions. In particular, we emphasize the convergence of in situ plant biodiversity preservation with microbiome preservation, which provides added value to nature and habitat conservation, as living collections of microbiome biodiversity. The heuristic value of bioinoculants (viz., synthetic communities) and the need of proper computational models to predict the outcome of their applications is also discussed toward a systems-biology-guided synthetic microbiota development.

Deep learning is an emerging data analytic tool that can improve predictability, efficiency and sustainability in agriculture. With a bibliometric analysis of 156 articles, we show how deep learning methods have been applied in the context of sustainable agriculture. As a general publication trend, China and India are leading countries for publication, international collaboration is still minor. Deep learning has been popularly applied in the context of smart agriculture across scales for individual plant monitoring, field monitoring, field operation and robotics, predicting soil, water and climate conditions and landscape-level monitoring of land use and crop types. We identified that the potential of deep learning had been investigated mainly for predicting soil (abiotic), water, climate and vegetation dynamics, but ecological characteristics are critically understudied. We also highlight key themes that can be better addressed with deep learning for fostering sustainable agriculture: (i) including above- and belowground ecological dynamics such as ecosystem functioning and ecotone, (ii) evaluating agricultural impacts on other ecosystems and (iii) incorporating the knowledge and opinions of domain experts and stakeholders into artificial intelligence. We propose that deep learning needs to go beyond automatic data analysis by integrating ecological and human knowledge to foster sustainable agriculture.

Global change is affecting soil biodiversity and functioning across all terrestrial ecosystems. Still, much is unknown about how soil biodiversity and function will change in the future in response to simultaneous alterations in climate and land use, as well as other environmental drivers. It is crucial to understand the direct, indirect and interactive effects of global change drivers on soil communities and ecosystems across environmental contexts, not only today but also in the near future. This is particularly relevant for international efforts to tackle climate change like the Paris Agreement, and considering the failure to achieve the 2020 biodiversity targets, especially the target of halting soil degradation. Here, we outline the main frontiers related to soil ecology that were presented and discussed at the thematic sessions of the World Biodiversity Forum 2022 in Davos, Switzerland. We highlight multiple frontiers of knowledge associated with data integration, causal inference, soil biodiversity and function scenarios, critical soil biodiversity facets, underrepresented drivers, global collaboration, knowledge application and transdisciplinarity, as well as policy and public communication. These identified research priorities are not only of immediate interest to the scientific community but may also be considered in research priority programmes and calls for funding.