Global agricultural land, covers roughly 4.8 billion hectares, which is about one-third of the world's total land area. This area includes both cropland (33%) and permanent pastures (67%). While the world has a total forest area of 4.06 billion hectares (ha), which is 31% of the total land area. However, when it comes to biodiversity research and conservation we often gravitate towards forested areas and conveniently tend to ignore the vast agricultural landscapes, which might be playing a very crucial role in supporting and conserving significant amount of biodiversity. Conservation biologists often criticize and vilify agriculture landscapes as an anticlimax to forest ecosystems and blame them as one of main drivers of habitat loss and biodiversity extinction. But viewing them from a different point of view, agriculture landscapes could potentially be an important habitats for wildlife. Besides being home to vast amount of agro-biodiversity (thousands of crop plant species and hundreds of livestock breeds), agriculture landscapes might be home to many wild animal species like the antelopes, foxes, wolves, etc. Many fish species that often use inundated rice fields for breeding. Many bird species like the open billed storks, cattle egrets, etc that are often found feeding in the inundated rice fields. Furthermore, farmers around the world have been playing a significant role in the conservation of both agro-biodiversity (crop plant species and livestock breeds) and wildlife, but their valuable contributions to biodiversity conservation are totally ignored and never incentivized. In this context is it possible to evaluate the contributions of farmers and agriculture landscapes to conservation of biodiversity and design incentivizing mechanisms to support and celebrate their valuable contributions to biodiversity conservation?

More Kanna K. Siripurapu's questions See All
Similar questions and discussions