Globally, 852 million people, mainly in developing countries are still chronically or acutely malnourished. At the same time, we witness continuing loss of habitat and species extinctions in the wake of agricultural development and expansion. The first of eight Millennium Development Goals is “eradicate extreme hunger and poverty”, whereas goal number seven is to “ensure environmental sustainability”. These MDG’s will not be reached without securing the ability of the rural poor to feed their families and supply growing markets while also protecting the biodiversity and ecosystem services that sustain their livelihoods. Ecologists have a distinct role to play in the alleviation of global hunger, restoration of ecosystems functions and processes, and conservation of biodiversity by working in the agricultural landscape. At the 2006 ESA meeting in Memphis, participants in an organized oral session on the “role of ecology in poverty alleviation” discussed the use of ecology in alleviating poverty and ensuring environmental sustainability. This session made clear that ecologists are needed to “paint the big picture.” The tradition of elucidating complex systems and relationships and working across scales and disciplines enables ecologists to guide management so as to build on synergies between rural livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and food security. In this session, we will focus on these three objectives and on how they can be attained use the conceptual framework developed by the EcoAgriculture Partnership. Ecoagriculture provides a framework for landscape management and restoration that enables an integrated approach – putting food security at the heart of conservation, and conservation at the heart of food security. Much of the ecological knowledge needed to address the challenges of hunger alleviation is already available; we must focus on information needs and exchanges necessary to apply knowledge in the appropriate social and ecological contexts.

This session will (1) present the EcoAgriculture framework, focusing on ecology’s contribution to landscape management of agroecosystems, (2) present a framework for measuring landscape performance within agroecosystems (3) offer case studies where the ecoagricultural framework has been implemented and lessons learned from these studies, and (4) discuss the challenges and opportunities that arise from using the ecoagriculture framework for restoration of ecosystem processes and functions (including productivity) of agricultural landscapes.