Functional
Ecology home
About functional ecology
(View PDF file to print this page)
The project
This project's goal is to develop relevant functional ecology measures for growers striving to understand how their management practices affect farm ecology. These measures can also be used by a variety of regulatory, environmental and conservation programs in US agriculture to report outcomes for improved conservation and pollution abatement. The project utilizes routinely collected IPM monitoring data and links it to conservation program outcome measurement.
About functional ecology
Terrestrial and aquatic food webs respond to an integrated complex of abiotic and biotic factors which are reflected in their structure (species assemblages) and inter/intra species density relationships. Thus a food web or ecological system is "functional" and "sustainable" when it works well enough to partition energy in the form of nutrients and waste products in the environment in order to perpetuate itself. "Functional" can also imply resilience to human disruptions. In this sense, "functional" assemblages of organisms in a food web or an agroecosystem can process pollutants and pesticides, sustain agronomic and horticultural production practices and mitigate other environmental stressors to yield various environmental, ecological and aesthetic amenities resulting in sustainable human societies. See Figure 1 below for a conceptual vision for how functional ecology measurement systems might work.
Figure 1 (View larger image of Figure 1 with details, or view PDF file of diagram for printing.)
View larger image of Figure 1 with details, or view PDF file of diagram for printing.
Conceptual overview
Today, governments representing free societies have a vested 'public good' interest in both public and private land resource conservation, and would like to know whether or not their agricultural production systems are "healthy" and in "working order." Farmers also want to know if their fields, orchards or pastures are sustainable economically, environmentally and ecologically.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) has responsibility under the 2002 Farm Bill to encourage various conservation practices on private lands. These conservation practices are implemented across the United States through specific conservation programs like EQIP (Environmental Quality Improvement Program), CSP (Conservation Security Program), etc. Various statutory measures regulate all government private landowner and grower conservation assistance programs. USDA/NRCS requires reporting by their employees and private landowner benefactors of their services. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has statutory responsibility to see that the USDA and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) report outcome measures for improved conservation and pollution abatement. Thus U.S. citizens or their elected officials can better evaluate governmental agency effectiveness when they develop programs across public and private lands. Citizens have a legal right to know the effectiveness of their tax-based assistance programs in promoting economic, environmental, ecological and sustainable investments on private lands.
How does government effectively assess the public's investment in conservation programs and outcomes? Although the answer would seem to be outcome measurement, in actual practice, relevant, accurate, and effective measures are not easily obtained nor are the reporting pathways always clear, practical or easily accessed by affected individuals or groups. Therefore, there are at least two major challenges; 1) developing relevant measures and 2) providing accurate, understandable and easily accessed reporting mechanisms.
Monitoring IPM
| Monitoring conducted as part of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on private lands probably comprises the most significant data collection systems in terms of both frequency and temporal/spatial scale in North America. These data are collected, analyzed and used to make a range of management decisions in agriculture, forestry, public lands and parks. Overwhelmingly, these data are collected through private sector resources such as producers, managers or professional consultants, scouts, or other advisors. Alternatively, Land Grant university researchers and extension personnel develop these IPM monitoring systems and implement them across the land through state programs. Their research, development and delivery of these systems also contribute to the scope of IPM sampling data available. Yet surprisingly, these data have never been considered comprehensively as a tool for USDA/NRCS conservation or USEPA measurement on private lands which comprise much of the U.S. land mass east and west of the Mississippi River, and perhaps 95% and 90% respectively of USDA/ARS and USEPA conservation efforts. Considering the measurement challenges and cost to U.S. taxpayers, one wonders how a predominately private sector generated data collection system with clear relevance to conservation outcome measures could have escaped development, utilization and reporting? |  |
Although these data will not answer all of the measurement needs, they collectively represent the most underexploited conservation outcome measurement systems in the U.S. and probably globally as well.
In row crop and pasture agriculture, the frequency of IPM data collection events may range from 4 to 10 times per growing season compared with specialty crops (fruits, vegetables, greenhouse and ornamentals) where IPM monitoring can range from relatively infrequent sampling like row crops to 2 to 3 times per week during critical events. Other agronomic measures including soil, water and nutrient sampling by comparison are conducted annually or less frequently except in multiple cropping situations in tropical or neo-tropical latitudes. Sound IPM measurement is not limited to pest occurrence and density, but includes information on predators, parasites, neutral species and key indicators as well.
Functional ecology measures from IPM sampling
This project is exploring the use of routinely collected IPM data to measure ecosystem health and thereby for making inferences to the success of public investments in conservation programs, pollution abatement, pesticide regulation and other public programs on private lands
 |
It is critical to first use a systems approach to design the spatial and temporal scale assessment parameters involved in conservation and protection program assessment. Essentially a conceptualized basic understanding of the ecosystems to be measured, the current and necessary target species and measures as well as the development of data interpolation and inference processes are codified in a diagram or figure (e.g. Figure 1 above). Data are then captured and assembled electronically from producers, scouts, consultants, extension, and others. One operational model would categorize, format, error check and summarize these data by USDA/CSREES Regional IPM Centers and submit them electronically to the USDA/NRCS or USEPA office responsible for relevant specific programs. Unlike many current programs, however, these data represent a truly independent and vast private-sector based evaluation opportunity for USDA/NRCS and USEPA programs. |
Further, these data may represent a far less expensive, comparatively vast and practical evaluation resource when compared with current programs tailored and carried out for specific agency programmatic evaluations.
IPM temporal and spatial sampling scales vary with agronomic and horticultural management needs yet the methodology and inference generation could be developed and proceed through a similar methodology to the area-frame sampling processes utilized by USDA/NASS. Thus scaling parameters and error terms can be established and used in inference generation. The IPM area-frame scaling methodologies would likely be organized regionally and nationally. Both regional and national statistics could then be used by numerous agencies, public and private organizations beyond USDA/NRCS and USEPA.
Today, all government agencies are under mandated program evaluation, strategic planning and Office of Management & Budget reporting procedures. Private sector based IPM data could be invaluable and relatively inexpensive to acquire considering the scope and quality of the data already collected through IPM processes. These data may represent the best local, regional and national ecosystem assessment resource for chronic ecosystem impact measures for pesticide impacts and thus their regulation. Further, they could be very useful for U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service wildlife impact assessments by using IPM professionals who are on the land daily across large tracks of private lands. Key species and designated surrogates or even endangered species could be assessed in a variety of ways. Thus various pesticide use patterns, pesticide drift modeling and ecosystems impact outcome analysis could more aptly utilize these IPM data because they are actually linked directly to the outcomes targeted by these agencies.
This quality, accessible, and tailored data resource could provide a much more extensive and relatively inexpensive program to measure outcomes of government policy than many of those in place today. Perhaps their best initial use would be to supplement on-going measurement programs. Then with familiarity and archived time-series analysis, they could be adapted more centrally. Yet today, these data lie largely undiscovered, unutilized and overlooked. If policymakers truly intend to foster independent measures of protected, fragile, threatened or even endangered habitats and species on private lands, what independent data resource could be developed that is more economical than one already on the land?
Agriculture, which is often maligned for its largely unmeasured, impacts on ecosystems, would have a ready-to-go IPM-based measurement system with relatively inexpensive utility and extensive scope and scale features. These data could become an independent and electronic data link for environmental assessment between U.S. agencies thus facilitating an unbiased assessment system based on data that are collected independently of government institutions. Thus U.S. society could access chronic measures of agriculture's impacts from pesticides, cultivation, irrigation, erosion, etc. in a comprehensive manner. IPM data capture, processing and scaling could be a regular function of the USDA/CSREES Regional IPM Centers and give these centers a critical role in environmental and ecological evaluation thus linking USEPA, USDA/NRCS and USDA/CSREES to the most extensive and intensive terrestrial ecosystem measures on earth.
Orchard biodiversity
Figure 2 attempts to integrate two very important (perhaps dominant) abiotic perturbation processes in orchards; 1) nutrient flow and 2) pesticides. Essentially it demonstrates the interaction of these two factors along a decreasing biodiversity line with a shaded patch representing the highest observed biodiversity observed from our 5-year study and more than 50 years of anecdotal observations.
Figure 2 (View larger image of Figure 2 with details, or view PDF file of diagram for printing.)
