ABSTRACT
When we describe agricultural biodiversity as the ‘complex patchwork of dynamic relations between people, plants, animals, other organisms and their environment’, our attention is drawn to the ‘people’ who develop and use, and thereby maintain agricultural biodiversity for their livelihoods, in all its levels (De Boef and Thijssen, Chapter 1.8). Plant genetic resource conservation strategies and community biodiversity management (CBM) primarily focus on local crops and varieties, as can be seen in many of the case studies discussed in this book. As a result of this, we tend to ignore dynamic relations between farming communities and agro-ecosystems, or, more specifically, the landscapes. In the current section, the authors share a number of relevant concepts and insights that approach agrobiodiversity at both landscapes and species levels, and which are supported by a series of case studies from Brazil, complemented by those from Ethiopia and India, that all focus on the relationship between people, biodiversity and landscapes.
