![]() ![]() Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths. Sustainable development of the agricultural bio-economy. Agroecosystems, nitrogen-use efficiency, and nitrogen management. Nutrient management in food production: Achieving agronomic and environmental targets. Nutrient imbalances in agricultural development. Agronomic phosphorus imbalances across the world's croplands. A high-resolution assessment on global nitrogen flows in cropland. Reducing environmental risk by improving N management in intensive Chinese agricultural systems. MIRCA2000-global monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas around the year 2000: a new high-resolution data set for agricultural and hydrological modeling. Crop yield gaps: their importance, magnitudes, and causes. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000. Greenhouse gas mitigation by agricultural intensification. Combining high biodiversity with high yields in tropical agroforests. Agricultural intensification: Will land spared from farming be land spared for nature? Conserv. Ecological intensification of cereal production systems: Yield potential, soil quality, and precision agriculture. Meeting cereal demand while protecting natural resources and improving environmental quality. Reconciling agricultural productivity and environmental integrity: a grand challenge for agriculture. Global food demand and the sustainable intensification of agriculture. Food security: the challenge of feeding 9 billion people. Meeting the food security and sustainability challenges of the coming decades is possible, but will require considerable changes in nutrient and water management. Furthermore, we find that there are large opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture by eliminating nutrient overuse, while still allowing an approximately 30% increase in production of major cereals (maize, wheat and rice). Large production increases (45% to 70% for most crops) are possible from closing yield gaps to 100% of attainable yields, and the changes to management practices that are needed to close yield gaps vary considerably by region and current intensity. We find that global yield variability is heavily controlled by fertilizer use, irrigation and climate. Here we present a global-scale assessment of intensification prospects from closing ‘yield gaps’ (differences between observed yields and those attainable in a given region), the spatial patterns of agricultural management practices and yield limitation, and the management changes that may be necessary to achieve increased yields. However, it is unclear what such efforts might entail for the future of global agricultural landscapes. Responding to these pressures, there is increasing focus on ‘sustainable intensification’ as a means to increase yields on underperforming landscapes while simultaneously decreasing the environmental impacts of agricultural systems 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11. Agricultural systems are already major forces of global environmental degradation 4, 7, but population growth and increasing consumption of calorie- and meat-intensive diets are expected to roughly double human food demand by 2050 (ref. In the coming decades, a crucial challenge for humanity will be meeting future food demands without undermining further the integrity of the Earth’s environmental systems 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. ![]()
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