Restoring biodiversity and ecological functions to a farmed landscape in California’s Central Valley

Can the ecological restoration of habitat in agricultural field margins increase landscape biodiversity and ecological function?  An increasing number of California farmers are “farmscaping” their once monocultured landscape.  At the margin of their fields they are restoring and protecting riparian corridors, planting hedgerows and constructing tailwater ponds.  This study attempts to make the link between these types of habitat enhancements and changes in biodiversity and ecosystem function by: 1. inventorying the existing biodiversity and the associated below-ground community structure and composition in the various habitats of a mature archetypal organic farm in California’s Central Valley; 2. monitoring key ecosystem functions of these habitats; and 3. developing a model that will enable stakeholders to evaluate the economic trade-offs required to provide these services. The results from two years of inventories show that greater diversity in above-ground species in the non-production areas was associated with greater diversity of some below ground communities.  Results from these inventories that include vegetation, nematodes, earthworms, soil microbial communities (phospholipid fatty acids analysis) will be presented as well as two years of monitoring data of carbon and nitrogen storage and losses through emissions, run-off and leaching.  The data show that habitat restoration in field margins will increase landscape biodiversity resulting in an increase in some ecosystem functions. However, widespread adoption of "farmscaping" practices will ultimately depend on economic tradeoffs between the value of increased ecosystem function and the cost of restoration.