Managing agroforestry transitions in a rapidly changing climate

Abstract

Agroforestry is a widely proposed solution for climate change adaptation and resilience in agriculture due to the multiplicity of socio-ecological benefits. However, agroforestry as a practice exists on a dynamic scale of ecological complexity, which may cause different management regimes to respond distinctively to climate change. Due to the limited literature on climate change impacts on agroforestry in the temperate region, this paper reviews disturbance regimes and the observed and predicted responses of forests and farms using the US Northeast as an example. We also reference scholarship from tropical regions, where agroforestry adoption/study is more advanced, to enhance understanding of the growing field of agroforestry in temperate systems. We view transitions to and from agroforestry from a complex systems lens by identifying the disturbance, complexity, resilience, and adaptive capacity of systems to drive and respond to rapid change via human management, focusing on invasive species, phenological changes and range shifts in plants, pests, and pathogens of agroforestry systems. Management considerations including structural diversity, species selection and the intentional/non-intentional incorporation of introduced species can promote community ecological resilience to build systems that have adaptive capacity to withstand changing conditions.