PLANTS + PEOPLE Lunchtime Talks: Biocultural Diversity in the Central Valley

While many people may think of California’s Central Valley as mostly monocultures of almonds and tomatoes, the landscape is also dotted with small-scale diversified farms. On these farms, you can find 50-100 different types of crops - from jujube to jicama, from papaya to moringa, from water spinach to taro, and many more. These polyculture farms are managed by immigrant and refugee farmers (mainly, Hmong and Mexican), who left their home country, where they also used to farm. These polyculture farms are biodiverse hotspots in the middle of the industrial, monoculture landscape of the Central Valley.

In my research, I explore how this high agrobiodiversity is related to pollinator communities and soil microbial communities. Specifically, I aim understand how on-farm diversification influences native bee communities and soil microbial communities. In general, my goal is to understand how we can reconcile agriculture and biodiversity conservation in the face of global change through working with small-scale diversified farmers. In this talk, I will present results from the past three years of field work along with stories from the field.

Speaker: Aidee Guzman, UC Berkeley