Population, Agriculture, and Biodiversity

Problems and Prospects

J. Perry Gustafson,Peter H. Raven,Paul R. Ehrlich

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780826274403
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Wissenschaft Allgemein

This timely collection of 15 original essays written by expert scientists the world over addresses the relationships between human population growth, the need to increase food supplies to feed the world population, and the chances for avoiding the extinction of a major proportion of the world's plant and animal species that collectively makes our survival on Earth possible. These relationships are highly intertwined, and changes in each of them steadily decrease humankind's chances to achieve environmental stability on our fragile planet.The world population is projected to be nine to ten billion by 2050, signaling the need to increase world food production by more than 70 percent on the same amount of land currently under production—and this without further damaging our fragile environment. The essays in this collection, written by experts for laypersons, present the problems we face with clarity and assess our prospects for solving them, calling for action but holding out viable solutions.

INDEX

abiotic stresses, 186, 192–196, 209, 214–217, 228

Abreds, 386

Acocella, N., 87

adaptive wild cereal genomic resources, 209–239

Adapt-N, 352

afforestation, 99

African savannas, 381–382

ag-investment, 16–17

agricultural revolution, 1, 33–34

agricultural self-sufficiency ratio, 67, 68, 69–70

Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, 247

agro-ecology, 82–83, 84, 110–111, 116

agronomic management, 154

air pollution, 346–349

Aisawi, K. A. B., 161

Alexandratos, N., 102

alleles, favorable, 181–182, 186, 193, 199

amino acid substitutions, 271

analytical hierarchy process, 87–89

Anderson, K., 66

Angelsen, A., 138–139

animal distribution, 328. See also livestock impact on biodiversity

animal diversity, grazing impacts on, 330–331

animal protein production, future of, 316–319

AquaBounty, 47

aquaculture, 318

aquaponics, 7, 45–46

Arimond, M., 106

arsenic, 263

arsenite, 265, 268

arthropods, number of, 366, 369

Askins, R. A., 379

association mapping, 193

Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), 38, 40, 42, 266

Barfoot, P., 248

barley, 210–211, 213–214, 213, 217, 218–219, 220–221, 229–230, 232, 237

Beche, E., 162

beef cattle, 126, 129, 131–132, 132, 140–141, 140, 141, 310, 317

Beyer, Peter, 49

biodiesel fuels, 128–129

biodiversity

deforestation and, 135–136

impact of agriculture on, 32, 78, 365–387

impact of grazing on, 325–331

livestock impact on, 305–332

loss of, 9–11, 16

tropical forests and, 123

biological extinction, 8–1...