Managing Biodiversity in Agricultural Ecosystems

Devra I. Jarvis is senior scientist, Agricultural Biodiversity and Ecosystems, in the Diversity for Livelihoods Programme at Bioversity International in Rome. She is the principal author of A Training Guide for In Situ Conservation On-Farm, which has been translated into Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese, and "A global perspective of the richness and evenness of traditional crop-variety diversity maintained by farming communities," published in the journal PNAS with twenty-eight coresearchers from five continents, which provides global indicators to monitor the loss of diversity in farmers' fields. Christine Padoch is the Matthew Calbraith Perry Curator of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden and an anthropologist. She was the associate scientific coordinator of the worldwide Project on People, Land Management and Environmental Change (PLEC) of the United Nations University. Her books include Conservation of Neotropical Forests: Working from Traditional Resource Use and People of the Tropical Rain Forest. H. David Cooper is senior programme officer for implementation and technical support at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Montreal. He was the coordinator and principal author of the Food and Agriculture Organization's first report on the State of the World's Plant Genetic Resources and a lead author on Food and Cultivated Ecosystems in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. He is the editor of Broadening the Genetic Base of Crop Production.