College of Agriculture

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As the foundation of the land grant mission at Montana State University, the College of Agriculture and the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station provide instruction in traditional and innovative degree programs and conduct research on old and new challenges for Montana’s agricultural community. This integration creates opportunities for students and faculty to excel through hands-on learning, to serve through campus and community engagement, to explore unique solutions to distinct and interesting questions and to connect Montanans with the global community through research discoveries and outreach.

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Author: search.filters.author.Duff, Hannahsearch.filters.applied.f.department: search.filters.department.Land Resources & Environmental Sciences

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    Momentum for agroecology in the USA
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-07) Ong, Theresa W.; Roman-Alcalá, Antonio; Jiménez-Soto, Estelí; Jackson, Erin; Perfecto, Ivette; Duff, Hannah
    The alarming convergence of ecological, health and societal crises underpins the urgent need to transform our agricultural and food systems. The global food system, with industrial agriculture at its core, poses a major threat to our planet’s health, contributing to climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity, which is known as the triple threat to humanity. The hidden costs of a global food system that relies on industrial agriculture are estimated to be US$12.7 trillion, with the vast majority driven by public-health crises due to unhealthy foods that disproportionately burden people on the lowest incomes.
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    Landscape context affects patch habitat contributions to biodiversity in agroecosystems
    (Wiley, 2024-06) Duff, Hannah; Debinski, Diane; Maxwell, Bruce D.
    Effective conservation schemes are needed to advance the dual objectives of biodiversity conservation and agronomic production in agricultural landscapes. Understanding how plant and arthropod taxa respond to both local habitat patch characteristics and landscape complexity is crucial for planning effective agri-environment schemes. This study investigated the relative effects of local variables (plant and insect diversity ≤100 m from patch habitat center) and landscape variables (landscape composition and configuration metrics ≤5 km from patch habitat center) on the diversity of plants and arthropods within noncrop habitat patches (1) at different spatial extents ranging from 0.1 to 5 km, while (2) quantifying differential effects of local and landscape variables on particular components of diversity (i.e., species richness and abundance), and accounting for (3) particular components of landscape extent (0.1-, 0.5-, 1-, 2-, and 5-km radii) and complexity (i.e., landscape composition and configuration). Landscape variables were significantly correlated with local plant and arthropod species richness and abundance at all spatial extents. Biodiversity responses to landscape variables were largely scale-dependent, as pairwise comparisons were significantly different between all spatial extents except between 1- and 2-km extents, and correlations were lowest at the 5-km extent. Partial R2 values for predicting local biodiversity were highest when both local and landscape variables were included as predictors of species richness and abundance, increasing from 0.163 to 0.469 when landscape variables were included, underscoring the importance of considering both local and landscape effects on local diversity. Landscape configuration variables accounted for more variation in plant and arthropod species richness than composition variables. However, models performed best when composition and configuration were considered together rather than alone, suggesting that both components of landscape complexity should be considered for identifying and managing conservation areas in crop fields. Existing conservation schemes that incentivize farmers to create or conserve seminatural patch habitat within crop fields may be more effective when combined with landscape-scale designs that enhance landscape complexity across the Northern Great Plains. Local conservation efforts should be coordinated with landscape-level efforts to ultimately enhance biodiversity and desired ecosystem service outcomes across agricultural landscapes.
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