Yield and Water Quality Impacts of Field-Scale Integration of Willow into a Continuous Corn Rotation System.

Agricultural landscape design has gained recognition by the international environmental and development community as a strategy to address multiple goals in land, water, and ecosystem service management; however, field research is needed to quantify impacts on specific local environments. The production of bioenergy crops in specific landscape positions within a grain-crop field can serve the dual purpose of producing cellulosic biomass (nutrient recovery) while also providing regulating ecosystem services to improve water quality (nutrient reduction). The effectiveness of such a landscape design was evaluated by the strategic placement of a 0.

Differential Functional Constraints Cause Strain-Level Endemism in Populations.

The adaptation of bacterial lineages to local environmental conditions creates the potential for broader genotypic diversity within a species, which can enable a species to dominate across ecological gradients because of niche flexibility. The genus maintains both free-living and symbiotic ecotypes and maintains an apparently ubiquitous distribution in freshwater ecosystems. Subspecies-level resolution supplemented with metagenome-derived genotype analysis revealed that differential functional constraints, not geographic distance, produce and maintain strain-level genetic conservation in populations across three geographically proximal riverine environments.

An Integrated Landscape Designed for Commodity and Bioenergy Crops for a Tile-Drained Agricultural Watershed.

Locating bioenergy crops on strategically selected subfield areas of marginal interest for commodity agriculture can increase environmental sustainability. Location and choice of bioenergy crops should improve environmental benefits with minimal disruption of current food production systems. We identified subfield soils of a tile-drained agricultural watershed as marginal if they had areas of low crop productivity index (CPI), were susceptible to nitrate-nitrogen (NO-N) leaching, or were susceptible to at least two other forms of environmental degradation (marginal areas).