Author Description

Agroforestry can reduce risks and promote sustainable agricultural production under shifting climate and weatherextremes by (1) reducing threats and enhancing agricultural landscape resiliency, (2) facilitating species movement tomore favorable conditions, (3) sequestering carbon, and (4) reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Although agroforestry practices can provide these positive adaptation and mitigation services, they in turn can be vulnerable to the sameforces. The design and management of agroforestry systems must therefore take into account how these systems canincorporate resiliency into agriculture in ways that the systems are more resilient to these changing conditions. As akey step in this process, the authors conducted a search of the scientific literature on agroforestry’s role in adaptationand mitigation under climatic variability and change, as well as on the effects of these stressors on agroforestry. Thetemporal scope of the literature search focused on the period of 1992 to 2017, and the geographical scope concentrated on temperate agricultural regions.U.S. agricultural operations and landscapes are already impacted by changes in climate patterns and weather variability, with impacts expected to increase throughout the 21st century. Future growing conditions across the temperate zone of the United States are predicted to include longer growing seasons that could potentially increase crop yields but also increase heat waves, floods, droughts, and insect and weed issues deleterious to production. Other ecosystem services that we, as a society, derive from farms and ranches—such as clean water, soil and air quality, and wildlife habitat—can also be negatively impacted. Enhancing food security and preserving other vital ecosystem services from U.S. agricultural lands under current and future shifting weather and climate conditions will require a transition to production systems that are more productive, use inputs more efficiently, have greater stabilit