ABSTRACT: With mounting biodiversity and climate crises, there is increasing pressure on land stewards, farmers, and other leaders in land-use to make America’s ‘breadbasket’ more resilient. While there is overwhelming evidence that biodiversity underpins resilience, most Midwestern landscapes remain dominated by monocultures of annual crops, with biodiversity relegated to degraded and fragmented habitats. Designing, incentivizing, implementing, and maintaining biodiverse landscapes for both production and resilience to uncertain future conditions is a major challenge of our time.
In this talk, Zack Miller of The Nature Conservancy in Missouri will discuss landscape-scale ecological health and how the incorporation of ecological design can benefit human health and ecosystem function, undergirding more diverse, resilient, and regenerative socio-ecological systems. Miller will use the Missouri River Center, a new collaborative conservation project on the banks of the Missouri River in Boone County, MO, as a case study for exploring intentional design, co-benefits, cost-share opportunities, and polyculture food production in wetland and floodplain habitats. This ~164-acre project will be comprised by a mosaic of wetlands, alley cropping systems with native, flood-tolerant perennial fruit and nut trees, multi-functional riparian buffers, and amenities to support a variety of educational and training programs. The project aims to re-establish diverse food forests in the fertile floodplain and to serve as a learning and gathering place for public and partners.
