Remote Sensing & Agro-informatics Lab

Expanding conservation efforts beyond protected areas to include agricultural ecosystems is essential for protecting biodiversity. Despite global increases in protected areas, terrestrial biodiversity remains under unprecedented pressure. Agriculture, a growing land use that occupies ~40% of the world’s land area, presents both challenges and opportunities for conservation. Reconciling agricultural production with biodiversity conservation is key for addressing the global climatic and environmental crises, both currently and under future climate and land-use scenarios. Yet, our ability to promote policies for biodiverse and sustainable agroecosystems is hindered by gaps in data availability, in efficient large-scale methods to monitor biodiversity, and in understanding the socio-economic and ecological outcomes of farming practices. To address these gaps, we propose BASIL (Biodiversity in Agroecosystems Studies, IsraeL), a multidisciplinary research center for long-term biodiversity studies in Israel’s agricultural areas, which will work towards the following objectives: (1) Curate and synthesize the existing knowledge on biological diversity and associated ecosystem services in Israel’s agroecosystems; (2) Develop and validate cost-effective, high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools for agroecosystems; (3) Assess how shifting farming practices, anticipated in response to climate and land-use changes, impact biodiversity in Israel’s Mediterranean, semi-arid and desert agroecosystems; (4) Set the socio-economic arena for promoting sustainable agroecological policies and farmers’ adoption of biodiversity-friendly farming practices; (5) Generate policy recommendations to support biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems, based on spatial modeling of future climate and land-use scenarios and on socio-economic analyses.

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Website: https://basilproject.weebly.com/