Agricultural landscapes in the United States (US) are becoming drastically simplified and commodified, causing concern for biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and widening socioeconomic injustices upon which US agriculture has been built. Given that crop production is heavily concentrated in certain areas and crop diversity is declining, there is a critical need to understand pathways toward diversifying agricultural systems and increasing agrobiodiversity writ large. This research addresses this need through mixed and multiscale methods and urges the immediacy of reckoning with past and present land use paradigms to re-imagine what is possible.
Kaitlyn Spangler (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Geography at Penn State University focused on transdisciplinary climate science.