"Building Climate Resilience Into Perennial Agroecosystems Via Forage and Grassland Diversity".

Adapting to future climate changes will require resilient agricultural systems. Resiliency can be thought of as the ability of an ecosystem to bounce back and persist after a disturbance or shock. Stressors or perturbations may be more severe in the future because of human-induced climate change. One of the suggested ecological approaches for building resiliency into perennial grassland systems includes adaptively managing species diversity to cope with or even to take advantage of variability in land and climate. A challenge in applying diversity concepts in practice is a lack of information on desired attributes of plant species needed to inform decisions on establishing, maintaining, and managing complex forage plant communities. This presentation will address critical knowledge gaps regarding management of highly diverse plant communities in forage and grazinglands as a strategy to enhance resilience in the face of climate change.