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Climate change and crop-pest dynamics in the Mediterranean Basin

by Luigi Ponti - ENEA, and Center for the Analysis of Sustainable Agricultural Systems Global, Kensington, California - Andrew Paul Gutierrez - Center for the Analysis of Sustainable Agricultural Systems Global, Kensington, California, and College of Natural Resources, University of California, Berkeley - and Massimo Iannetta - ENEA

 

DOI 10.12910/EAI2016-046

Climate change will make assessing and managing crop-pest systems in the Mediterranean Basin more difficult than elsewhere on the globe. The Basin is in many ways a hot spot of global change – as higher as the average projected climate change threatens an extremely rich and intertwined biological and cultural diversity– and increases its vulnerability to biological invasions. As a consequence, pest problems in this hot spot will require a holistic approach to deconstruct the elusive complex interactions that are the underpinning a sound decision making at the field level

Building on over 30 years of multidisciplinary progress inspired by pioneering work at University of California, the ENEA GlobalChangeBiology project, in collaboration with CASAS Global, is developing an interdisciplinary tool to mechanistically describe (i.e., model), analyze and manage agro-ecological problems based on the unifying paradigm that all organisms including humans acquire and allocate resources by analogous processes – the paradigm of ecological analogies that is holistic by design.

Recent analyses using this approach show how the tool has provided and will continue to provide governmental agencies with the scientific basis for building eco-social resilience to climate warming into agricultural systems across the Mediterranean Basin and elsewhere.

An expanded version of the present paper including figures and the full set of references is available as ENEA Technical Report 2016 “Climate change and crop-pest dynamics in the Mediterranean Basin” (ISSN 0393-3016) …

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