Agroecology
Aims and activities
The Agroecology Group aims to provide a rigorous scientific basis for sustainable croplands. We examine how plants, animals and microbes may interact to form a dynamic ecosystem supporting long-term economic offtake. Our home base is the maritime croplands of the north-east Atlantic, from where we collaborate in a range of climatic and ecological zones across Europe and beyond. Integral to our enterprise is a comprehensive and unique knowledge transfer chain that links research to applications in management, policy and the public understanding of science. We are active in global debates on food security, biodiversity and the sustainable use of resources. Contact: Geoff Squire
- Research and applications
- Staff, capability, infrastructure
- Students, teaching, outreach
- Funding
- Previous work
- Publications
Research and applications
Our research crosses scales from the individual to the landscape. Individuals are examined through the functional traits and properties that link them to each other and to their surrounds. Groups of individuals form populations that exchange genes and interact for sunlight, water and nutrients. Populations of different organisms - plants, insects, microbes - mediate the movement and transformation of energy and matter in fields and woodland. Fields, woods and other habitat form landscape mosaics through which individuals move and interact. Feedbacks occur between all scales: the landscape evolves because of the working of individuals, including people, while individuals are limited by the constraints of the landscape. Applications include:
- sustainable cropping systems - production within safe environmental limits
- environmental risk assessment - whole system approaches to hazard and exposure
- nitrogen cycling in croplands - N fixation, inputs and losses, N-efficient plants
- sustaining functional biodiversity - crops, wild plants, arthropods, microorganisms
- weeds and aliens - pros and cons in crop-weed coexistence.
Staff, capability, infrastructure
W
e are mainly biologists, quantitative ecologists and mathematical modellers, whose scales of interest range from landscape to community and organism. Graham Begg is a biologist/modeller working on population dynamics and landscape mosaics. Cathy Hawes, an ecologist, works on functional biodiversity and sustainable crop systems. Alison Karley is a physiologist, looking at nutrient relations among plants, insects and endosymbionts. Pete Iannetta, ecologist, examines plant traits, notably in weeds and legumes. Geoff Squire is a biologist, specialising in systems. Mark Young provides bespoke GIS and IT solutions to aid databasing, remote recording and modeling. Current post-doctoral researchers include Euan James who specialises in nitrogen fixation and legumes, and Richard Dye, a software engineer and mathematical modeller. Recent changes: Nick Birch has moved to the Chemical Ecology group at The James Hutton Institute but works closely with Agroecology on several EU projects; Scott Johnson has taken a position at the University of Western Sydney but retains working links through Technology Strategy Board projects and PhD students.
Technical staff include Gillian Banks, Linda Ford and Fiona Falconer (Scottish Government funding), Anna Skiba (LINK) and Carolyn Mitchell and Robbie McLaren (TSB). Capabilities include supervising major field surveys, controlled environment studies in glasshouse and growth chamber, molecular and biochemical laboratory analyses and plant-insect relations. Technical and scientific staff practise strict quality control procedures for collection, checking auditing and analysis of data. For information on students see below.
Capability and infrastructure
Over the last few years the team has built a strong and in many ways unique research infrastructure that is valued throughout the institute and by external collaborators.
- field platform, 40 hectares, at the Centre for Sustainable Cropping at Balruddery Farm near Dundee – management and scientific direction provided by Agroecology to establish the Centre as the pre-eminent research platform for balancing provisioning and other services in the north European maritime region
- arable-grass farm network, eastern Scotland – currently >100 fields - in which biophysical indicators of soil and food webs are compared with management and offtake
- glasshouse, growth room, field plot facilities at The James Hutton Institute's farms
- nutrient extraction and analysis: EA, HPLC, ICP-MS, to quantify mineral nutrients, organic nutrients, secondary compounds, protein content
- molecular tools: markers and diagnostic methods to describe and quantify molecular diversity of weed, insect and microbial endosymbiont groups
- mathematical modelling: spatially-explicit, individual to landscape
- statistics: multivariate and univariate analyses, graphical data exploration, GLM, multiple linear regression, relational databases, etc.
Students, teaching, outreach
The group hosts and supervises students at doctorate, masters and undergraduate levels. Typically 10-15 students are engaged in practical work in the group in any year. All students are registered at universities, including Aberdeen, Dundee, Durham, Edinburgh, York and St Andrews. We supervise students or link in other ways with universities overseas at Arkansas, Guelph, Idaho, Manitoba, Paris-Sud, Tromso, Trondheim, Wageningen and elsewhere.
Group members regularly lecture on university courses, speak to visiting students and interest groups, and are active in the Centre for Environmental Change and Human Resilience, a joint initiative between The James Hutton Institute and the University of Dundee. Professor Steve Hubbard provides close links and collaborations with universities of Dundee and St Andrews. Professor Janet Sprent, Emeritus, Dundee is closely associated with the group's work on legumes and nitrogen fixation.
Research is closely tied to outreach and knowledge-exchange through the following channels:
- LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) Innovation Centre at The James Hutton Institute, coordinated by the Agroecology group
- Living Field project on education, outreach and public understanding (managed by Agroecology and the Soil Ecology group)
- the Centre for Sustainable Cropping – a long term research-to-application platform at The James Hutton Institute’s Balruddery Farm, coordinated by staff in Agroecology
- Environment, risk assessment and biodiversity – liaison with NGOs, UK government bodies, the EC and member states
Funding
The Agroecology group is funded from three main sources - the Scottish Government, the EU and a range of industrial partnerships. The Scottish Government programme 2011-16 supports strategic research on ecosystem services, biodiversity and ecosystem function in the lowland arable-grass croplands of the north-east Atlantic. The group also contributes to work in the Scottish Government funded Centres of Expertise in Waters and Climate Change.
EU networks
The group is part of four EU networks linking more than 60 partners across Europe in major collaborative projects:
- Integrated pest management in the EU FP7 PURE project, 2011-2014
- Legumes in European cropping systems: Legume Futures EU FP7, 2010-2013
- Risk assessment of biotech crops in European agroclimatic regions: EU FP7 AMIGA project, 2012-14
- Coexistence of GM cropping- EU FP6 SIGMEA project (completed).
Industrial collaborations
UK industrial collaborations take scientific findings to applications on the land. Current projects include definition and selection of wheat ideotypes for reduced input cropping (Sustainable Arable Link, 2011-2014); biopesticides as replacement for EU pesticide withdrawals (SCEPTRE, now managed through the Chemical Ecology group); physical resistance traits in soft fruit integrated pest management (Technology Strategy Board, 2010-2014, with geneticists at The James Hutton Institute); legumes such as faba bean for animal feed (multi-partner project funded by Technology Strategy Board, 2012-2914, with geneticists at The James Hutton Institute).
Previous work
Many of the skill sets current in agroecology developed at the Institute during the coordinated programmes funded by the Scottish Government in the late 1990s, and were refined through external projects 1998-2008 on the ecological and economic impacts of GM crops. Full details including publications can be found at the Ecological biosafety and geneflow web pages on the previous SCRI website, or go directly via the following links to the UK’s Farm Scale Evaluations of GMHT crops, the EU ECOGEN project on GM insect resistant crops; the GMO Guidelines project in Brazil, Kenya and Vietnam (IOBC); the EU SIGMEA project on coexistence; and a series of major projects on Gene movement and persistence funded by Defra, RERAD and BBSRC.
The group and close colleagues, took lead roles in the 2006-11 RERAD programmes, notably in the Sustainable Crop Systems workpackage, and the BBSRC (trophic) LINK project (2005-2008).
Publications
A sample of the groups's recent peer reviewed publications.
Begg, G.S., Wishart, J., Young M.W., Squire, G.R., Iannetta, P.P.M. Genetic structure among arable populations of Capsella bursa-pastoris L. Medik is linked to functional traits and in-field conditions. Ecography 33. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0587.2011.07030.x (in press)
Deng, W., Jeng, D.S., Toorop, P.E., Squire, G.R. and Iannetta, P.P.M. 2011. A mathematical model of mucilage expansion in myxospermous seeds of Capsella bursa-pastoris L. Medic (shepherd's purse). Annals of Botany (in press).
Birch, A.N.E., Begg, G.S., Squire, G.R. 2011. How agro-ecological research helps to address food security issues under new IPM and pesticide reduction policies for global crop production systems (Invited Review). Journal of Experimental Botany 62, 3251-3261.
Karley, A.J., Valentine, T.A., Squire, G.R. 2011. Dwarf alleles differentially affect barley root traits influencing nitrogen acquisition under low nutrient supply. Journal of Experimental Botany 62, 3917-3927.
Squire, G.R., Breckling, B., Pfeilstetter, A., Jorgensen, R.B., Lecomte, J., Pivard, S., Reuter, H., Young, M.W. 2011. Status of feral oilseed rape in Europe: its minor role as a GM impurity and its potential as a reservoir of transgene persistence. Environmental Science and Pollution Research 18, 111-118.
Bontemps, C., Elliott, G.N., Simon, M.F., Dos Reis Júnior, F.B., Gross, E., Lawton, R.C., Neto, N.E., Loureiro, M.d., de Faria, S.M., Sprent, J.I., James, E.K. and Young, J.P.W. 2010. Burkholderia species are ancient symbionts of legumes. Molecular Ecology 19, 44-52.
Hawes, C., Squire, G.R., Hallett, P.D., Watson, C.A. and Young, M.W. 2010. Arable plant communities as indicators of farming practice. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 138, 17-26.
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