Call for Papers: Emerging Crop Diversification Strategies for Improving Land Productivity, Food Security and Dryland Agriculture

Submission deadline: Tuesday, 31 October 2023

Ensuring the food and nutritional demand of a growing population is one of the major sustainability challenges of this twenty-first century as the latest body of evidence indicates that the resilience of agricultural systems, especially the dryland production systems are being adversely affected by changing environmental conditions, including climate change, pollution and overexploitation of resources. The recent food and nutrition security status shows an upward trajectory of malnutrition across the world as >2 billion people did not have access to affordable and nutritious food even after the completion of the first phase of the UN-Sustainable Development Goals. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated the situation, with a grave consequence on marginalized and vulnerable people. On other hand, more than 50% of the global agricultural lands are being degraded due to multiple drivers of changes. Therefore, exploring new models of sustainable cropping patterns is critical for maintaining the fertility of agricultural land systems including drylands while preventing malnutrition and also for facilitating the transition towards a planetary healthy food production .

In this context, we are editing a Special Issue in Land Degradation & Development titled “Emerging Crop Diversification Strategies for Improving Land Productivity, Food Security, and Dryland Agriculture” to showcase the emerging crop-diversification patterns across the globe for increasing land productivity, agrobiodiversity, and food and nutrition security, while reducing ecological footprints.

Topics for this call for papers include but not restricted to:

• Latest trends in adoption of crop diversification strategies from various agro-climatic regions of the world for improving land fertility and agricultural sustainability
• Sustainable strategies for the restoration of marginal, degraded and polluted agricultural lands for attaining UN-Sustainable Development Goals
• Emerging climate smart crop diversification patterns for enhancing soil carbon pool, diversity of beneficial microorganisms in soil and also the resilience of dryland agriculture
• Role of neglected, underutilized and wild plants in crop diversification, dietary diversification, food security and land management
• Agroforestry-based crop diversification models for enhancing food security and land productivity
• Nature based solutions, traditional ecological/agricultural knowledge and traditional land management practices for improving agricultural sustainability and dryland productivity

Guest Editors:

Purushothaman Chirakkuzhyil Abhilash
Banaras Hindu University
India

Jan Frouz
Charles University
Czech

Rajan Chaurasia
Shri Murli Manohar Post Graduate College
India

Amit Kumar Bundela
Banaras Hindu University
India

Ali El-Keblawy
University of Sharjah
United Arab Emirates

Ayyanadar Arunachalam
ICAR-Central Agro-forestry Research Institute
India

Othmane Merah
Universite de Toulouse
France

Suresh Babu
International Food Policy Research Institute
United States

Ch. Srinivasa Rao
ICAR-National Academy of Agricultural Research & Management
India

Keywords: Crop diversification; Land fertility; Agricultural sustainability; Dryland agriculture; dietary Diversification; Food security; Land management; Land productivity

Submission Guidelines/Instructions

For manuscript preparation, please follow the LDD Author Guidelines. Manuscripts should be submitted online at https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/LDR by registering and logging into the website and can be submitted until the deadline below.

To ensure the manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, it is important to choose the article type as “Emerging Crop Diversification Strategies for Improving Land Productivity, Food Security and Dryland Agriculture [SI-2023-000074]” when submitting papers to the journal. All papers will be peer-reviewed according to LDD peer-review protocols.