Clara I. Nicholls

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · International Area Studies (IAS)

Given environmental, economic, and social costs of unilateral chemical and biotechnological interventions to control pests, there is an urgent need to transition towards a knowledge-intensive holistic approach emphasizing agroecosystem design and management. The focus will be on what makes agroecosystems susceptible and vulnerable to insect pests,...

Documentando la evidencia en Agroecología: Una perspectiva Latinoamericana CONTEXTO DE ESTE INFORME Los cambios profundos en la forma en que se cultivan procesan, distribuyen, consumen y desperdician los alimentos durante las últimas décadas generan amenazas cada vez mayores para el futuro de la alimentación a nivel local, nacional y global. Cuando...

Individual agroecological farms can act as lighthouses to amplify the uptake of agroecological principles and practices by other farmers. Amplification is critical for the upscaling of agroecological production and socio-political projects emphasizing farmer sovereignty and solidarity. However, territories are contested spaces with historical, soci...

En un intento de la Global Alliance for the Future of Food (https:// futureoffood.org) de elevar los enfoques agroecológicos en la agenda de los procesos globales de definición de políticas agrarias, se pidió a varios grupos a través del mundo, entre ellos CELIA (www.celia.agroeco.org), articular claramente el cuerpo de evidencia que respalda la vi...

The multiple crises facing humanity at the onset of the Anthropocene are creating a moment in which agroecology acquires greater relevance as an alternative approach for meeting sustainable development goals and providing guidelines for the reconstruction of a post-COVID-19 agricultural system that is capable of minimizing future widespread disrupt...

The COVID-19 crisis has created a moment where existing calls for agroecology acquire new relevance. Agroecology provides a path to reconstruct a post-COVID-19 agriculture, one that is able to avoid widespread disruptions of food supplies in the future by territorializing food production and consumption. There are five main areas in which agroecolo...

A key strategy in agroecology is to restore functional biodiversity in agroecosystems at field and landscape levels. Biodiversity performs essential ecological services, and, if correctly assembled in time and space, it can lead to agroecosystems capable of sponsoring their own crop protection. Diversity can be enhanced in crop fields by means of c...

Designing biodiverse, productive and resilient urban farms

A transition to an agriculture based on agroecological principles would provide rural families with significant socioeconomic and environmental benefits. If agroecology has such great potential to feeding the world, why it is not adopted more widely by farmers? Most research analyzing factors needed for scaling up agroecology focuses on the social...

Coffee leaf rust (CLR) attacked Central American coffee farms during the post-2011 epidemic, driving production loss across the region. In response, smallholders are adapting agroecological and conventional practices. We compare varietal adaptations of small conventional and organic farmers in Copán, Honduras. We show farmers are growing a greater...

This article briefly traces the origins of agroecology in Latin America, and its application by nongovernmental organizations in rural development, its evolution and contributions in academia, and its adoption and dissemination by social rural movements.

Most efforts to improve agricultural production remain focused on practices driven by an intensification agenda and not by an agroecological one. Agroecology transcends the reformist notion of organic agriculture and sustainable intensification proponents who contend that changes can be achieved within the dominant agroindustrial system with minor...

Modern agroecosystems require systemic change, but new redesigned farming systems will not emerge from simply implementing a set of practices (rotations, composting, cover cropping, etc.) but rather from the application of already well defined agroecological principles. These principles can be applied using various practices and strategies, each ha...

È ormai chiaro che l'umanità ha bisogno di un paradigma alternativo di sviluppo agricolo che promuova un'agricoltura più solida in termini ecologici, bio-diversificata, resiliente, sostenibile e socialmente giusta. Base di questo nuovo paradigma è la moltitudine di sistemi agricoli dotati di razionalità ecologica messi a punto in centinaia di milio...

Lo scritto riporta una riflessione degli autori sulla necessità di diffondere, consolidare e valorizzare un modello alternativo rispetto a quello proposto nel corso del ventesimo secolo dalla Rivoluzione Verde, partendo da un’analisi dei limiti che questa ha mostrato a distanza di alcuni decenni dal suo avvio. L’allarmante riduzione di risorse chia...

Diverse, severe, and location-specific impacts on agricultural production are anticipated with climate change. The last IPCC report indicates that the rise of CO 2 and associated " greenhouse " gases could lead to a 1.4 to 5.8 °C increase in global surface temperatures, with subsequent consequences on precipitation frequency and amounts. Temperatur...

RESUMEN El propósito de este artículo es caracterizar nueve agroecosistemas de café de los Andes colombianos con un enfoque agroecoló-gico. Los atributos y los indicadores evaluados son agrupados en tres dimensiones: económica, social y técnico-productiva. Los indicadores son sensibles a las condiciones del agroecosistema y pueden ser fácilmente co...

The purpose of this paper is to characterize nine coffee agroecosystems from the Colombian Andes with an agroecological approach. Attributes and indicators evaluated are grouped under three dimensions: economic, social and technical-productive. Indicators are sensitive to agroecosystem conditions and can be easily understood by farmers. Low product...

Cross pollination in coffee increases their quality and the efficiency of pollination has a positive trend with richness of pollinators. The Main Agroecological Structure (MAS) is a new concept to identify and characterize the agroecosystems. The method uses local variables related with agricultural management, landscape and cultural variables. As...

The threat of global climate change has caused concern among scientists because crop production could be severely affected by changes in key climatic variables that could compromise food security both globally and locally. Although it is true that extreme climatic events can severely impact small farmers, available data is just a gross approximatio...

The Green Revolution not only failed to ensure safe and abundant food production for all people, but it was launched under the assumptions that abundant water and cheap energy to fuel modern agriculture would always be available and that climate would be stable and not change. In some of the major grain production areas the rate of increase in cere...

Optimization of agroecosystem health is based on two pillars: habitat manipulation and soil fertility enhancement. The latter is achieved through management of organic matter and conservation of belowground biodiversity, and is the focus of the present chapter. The chapter first looks at ways in which soil fertility management can reduce plant susc...

Thirty-five percent of global production from crops including at least 800 cultivated plants depend on animal pollination. The transformation of agriculture in the past half-century has triggered a decline in bees and other insect pollinators. In North America, losses of bee colonies have accelerated since 2004, leaving the continent with fewer man...

The intensification of viticulture in California has led to the creation of grape monocultures characterized by an absence of non-crop plant diversity in and around vineyards. The continued expansion of vineyards into California native plant communities has also led to an aggregate reduction of non-crop habitats at the landscape scale (Heaton and M...

Agroecology utilizes principles to favor natural processes and biological interactions and synergies so that biodiverse horticultural agroecosystems are able to sponsor their own soil fertility, crop protection and productivity through the activation of soil biology, the recycling of nutrients, the enhancement of beneficial arthropods and antagonis...

En este artículo se analizan las potencialidades de la agroecología basada en el control de las comunidades locales para hacer frente a enormes problemas humanos como el hambre y el deterioro ambiental. Para ello se revisa la literatura existente y se analizan diversas experiencias locales como la milpa mexicana, las ANAP cubanas y la MASIPAG filip...

Ninety one percent of the 1500 million hectares of the worldwide cropland are mostly under annual crop monocultures of wheat, rice, maize, cotton, and soybeans (Smith & McSorley, 2000). These systems represent an extreme form of simplification of nature’s biodiversity, as monocultures in addition to being genetically uniform and species-poor system...

As the expansion of agroexports and biofuels continues unfolding in Latin America, the concepts of food sovereignty and agroecologically based production systems gain increasing attention. Miguel A. Altieri and Clara I. Nicholls suggest that the key importance will be the involvement of farmers directly in the formulation of the research agenda and...

We present the results of studies in organic vineyards in Mendocino and Sonoma counties, California, in an effort to systematize the emerging lessons from our experience on vineyard biodiversity enhancement for ecologically-based pest management. In the Mendocino study, a vegetational corridor connected to a riparian forest channeled insect biodive...

Resumen La mayoría de los modelos de cambio climático predicen que los daños serán compartidos de manera desigual por agricultores pequeños del tercer mundo, y particularmente por aquellos que dependen de las lluvias. El incremento en temperatura, sequía, precipitaciones fuertes, etc.; podrían reducir la productividad hasta en un 50% en algunas reg...

Introduction The integrated pest management concept (IPM) arose in the early 1970s in response to concerns about impacts of pesticides on the environment. By providing an alternative to the strategy of unilateral intervention with chemicals, it was hoped that IPM would change the philosophy of crop protection to one that entailed a deeper understan...

Conversión agroecológica de sistemas convencionales de producción: teoría, estrategias y evaluación. La conversion de sistemas convencionales de produccion, caracterizados por monocultivos manejados con altos insumos a sistemas diversificados de bajos insumos, se basa en dos pilares agroecologicos: la diversificacion del habitat y el manejo organic...

Agroforestry is an intensive land-management system that combines trees and shrubs with crops and livestock in time and space on a landscape level to achieve optimum benefits from biological interactions between soils, plants, and arthropods. Agroforestry systems (AFS) aim at balancing ecosystem demands to sustain diversity and productivity, while...

SUMMARY We present the results of our studies in organic vineyards in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties, California, in an effort to systematize the emerging lessons from our experience on vineyard biodiversity enhancement for ecologically-based pest management. In the Mendocino study, a vegetational corridor connected to a riparian forest channelled i...

Agroecosystem health can be optimized through management of two pillars: habitat manipulation and soil fertility enhancement. The present paper focuses on the second pillar, namely the enhancement of soil quality through the management of organic matter and conservation of the belowground biodiversity component of agricultural ecosystems. Tradition...

Small scale diversified systems which rely mostly on local resources and complex crop arrangements, are reasonably productive and stable, exhibiting a high return per unit of labor and energy. In many ways complex polycultures and agroforestry systems used by small tropical farmers mimic the structure and function of natural communities therefore a...

We describe a practical methodology to rapidly assess the soil quality and crop health of vineyard systems using sim- ple indicators chosen, applied and interpreted jointly by farmers and researchers. Field measurements are made on agroecosystem properties that reflect soil quality and plant health. As measurements are based on the same indicators,...

Cultural methods such as crop fertilization can affect susceptibility of plants to insect pests by altering plant tissue nutrient levels. Research shows that the ability of a crop plant to resist or tolerate insect pests and diseases is tied to optimal physical, chemical and mainly biological properties of soils. Soils with high organic matter and...

All’idea dell’esistenza di una biodiversità l’uomo pervenne concretamente solo nel ’700, allorchè Linneo fornì le basi di una classificazione sistematica degli esseri viventi, e della loro riconoscibilità. I primi esempi della vulnerabilità associata alla uniformità genetica delle monoculture si ebbero nell’800 in Francia e in Irlanda. Cosa succede...

This book contains 14 chapters discussing the field of habitat manipulation and how ecological engineering approaches to pest management can be developed and applied. Chapters explore the frontiers of ecological engineering methods including molecular approaches, high-tech marking and remote sensing. They also review the theoretical aspects of this...

This book contains 14 chapters discussing the field of habitat manipulation and how ecological engineering approaches to pest management can be developed and applied. Chapters explore the frontiers of ecological engineering methods including molecular approaches, high-tech marking and remote sensing. They also review the theoretical aspects of this...

In northwestern Portugal, peasants have developed complex vineyard (Vitis vinifera) systems comprising agroforests composed of host trees, vines, annual crops and in some cases animals. Until recently these vineyards suffered very few pest problems and received relatively low pesticide loads. In the last few years, new policy and market forces have...

This paper describes the evolution of IPM in Cuba during three pre- and post-revolutionary periods. The state of the art of IPM after the collapse of Cuba''s relations with the soviet block is analyzed in detail. During this ''special period'' Cuba is undergoing a major conversion from conventional agriculture dependent on external inputs to a semi...

This paper describes the evolution of IPM in Cuba during three pre-and post-revolutionary periods. The state of the art of IPM after the collapse of Cuba's relations with the soviet block is analyzed in detail. During this 'special period' Cuba is undergoing a major conversion from conventional agriculture dependent on external inputs to a semi-org...

The ultimate goal of all farmers should be to grow healthy and productive plants and animals, while maintaining the ecological integrity of the resource base of their farms. For agroecologists, such goals would translate into healthy agroecosystems exhibiting a high degree of integrity; a strong capacity to respond and adapt; and high levels of eff...

During 1996 and 1997, two adjacent 2.5 has organic vineyard blocks (A and B) were monitored to assess the distributional and abundance patterns of the Western grape leafhopper Erythroneura elegantula Osborn (Homoptera: Cicadellidae) and its parasitoid Anagrus epos Girault (Hymenoptera: Mymaridae), Western flower thrips Frankliniella occidentalis (P...

1 Maintenance of floral diversity throughout the growing season in vineyards in the form of summer cover crops of buckwheat ( Fagopyrum esculentum Moench) and sunflower ( Helianthus annus Linnaeus), had a substantial impact on the abundance of western grape leafhoppers, Erythroneura elegantula Osborn (Homoptera: Cicadellidae), and western flower th...

This chapter provides a brief historical overview of biological control in Latin America and describes some current programs, as well as suggestions to scale up classical biological control in the region. Most of the early work on biological control was concentrated on homopteran citrus pests, mainly because citrus marked the beginning of biologica...

Urban agriculture in Cuba has rapidly become a significant source of fresh produce for the urban and suburban populations. A large number of urban gardens in Havana and other major cities have emerged as a grassroots movement in response to the crisis brought about by the loss of trade, with the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989. These gardens...

This paper analyses the state of the art of biological control of greenhouse pests with special reference to Colombia, one of the world's largest producers of cut flowers. After a discussion of the use and impacts of selected natural enemies on a variety of arthropod pests in greenhouses, suggestions on how to enhance the effectiveness of inundativ...

An emergent contradiction in the contemporary development of biological control is that of the prevalence of the substitution of periodic releases of natural enemies for chemical insecticides and the dominance of biotechnologically developed transgenic crops. Input substitution leaves in place the monoculture nature of agroecosystems, which in itse...

After a brief history of pesticide use and impacts in Latin America, the paper analyzes how agricultural development programmes, from the Green Revolution to the promotion of non-traditional export crops, have perpetuated the pesticide treadmill in the region. A fundamental issue in the paper is to link the pesticide problem to the broader policy,...

Resumen Este articulo analiza la contribución que hacen los campesinos en América Latina hacia la producción de la mayor parte de los alimentos que las comunidades rurales y urbanas necesitan, a pesar del cambio climático y los elevados costos energéticos. Este potencial productivo se puede potenciar aun mas con la aplicación de los principios agro...

Libro que aborda las nuevas tendencias de la agricultura en un mundo global. El manejo ecológico de recursos productivos agrícolas, el mercado agrícola, la apertura comercial, la difusión de la biotecnología con los cultivitos transgénicos que si no son regulados desencadenarán procesos con efectos socioeconómicos y ambientales más dramáticos que l...

Degree granted in Entomology. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Davis, 1998.

Métodos culturales de manejo de suelos tales como la fertilización afectan la susceptibilidad de plantas al ataque de insectos plaga vía alteraciones de los niveles de nutrientes en los tejidos. Investigaciones revelan que la habilidad de una planta a tolerar la incidencia de plagas o enfermedades está ligada a las condiciones óptimas del suelo, en...

Métodos culturales de manejo de suelos tales como la fertilización afectan la susceptibilidad de plantas al ataque de insectos plaga vía alteraciones de los niveles de nutrientes en los tejidos. Investigaciones revelan que la habilidad de una planta a tolerar la incidencia de plagas o enfermedades está ligada a las condiciones óptimas del suelo, en...

Desde el inicio de la modernización agrícola, los agricultores e investigadores se han enfrentado al dilema que emerge de la homogenización de los agroecosistemas: el incremento de plagas y enfermedades que pueden alcanzar niveles devastadores en monocultivos uniformes y de larga escala.: una mayor vulnerabilidad. Este artículo explora estrategias...