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Biodiversity-based agriculture is the main form of agriculture practiced by smallholder farmers, who produce half the world's food, especially in the Global South. This form of agriculture relies on planned biodiversity intentionally managed by farmers and on the associated biodiversity that spontaneously colonizes the agroecosystem. In recent decades, there have been increasing calls from researchers and society to support biodiversity-based agriculture as an alternative paradigm to today's industrial agriculture. Building adapted governance and management systems for enhancing farmers' access to agrobiodiversity is a key challenge for the development of biodiversity-based agriculture. To achieve this, a better understanding of how farmer's access agrobiodiversity is needed, and in particular, how this access is affected by interactions between farmers and with institutions, i.e., social networks. In this article, we first review the literature on the role of social networks in farmers' access to agrobiodiversity, in the form of crop diversity and associated biodiversity, and the related knowledge to manage this diversity. This review points at a major knowledge gap concerning how the composition and structure of these networks affect farmers' access to agrobiodiversity. Then, we review literature on social-ecological networks to identify how this framework developed for environmental management could contribute in getting a better understanding of the role of social networks' structure and composition in farmers' access to agrobiodiversity. Based on this review, we propose a social-ecological network framework dedicated to crop diversity. Finally, we present potential applications of this framework to develop new participatory approaches for agrobiodiversity management and governance, adapted to biodiversity-based agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frequency and severity of natural hazards are predicted to increase with climate change. Collaboration among actors across scales and organizational boundaries is essential to address this escalation. Pre-existing social networks are generally considered a catalyst enabling actors to more quickly address collective action problems. However, empirically derived knowledge about if, how, and why pre-established social networks facilitate effective collaborations in addressing natural hazards is scarce. We use survey data from crisis responders of large-scale wildfires in Sweden and Canada to investigate factors that shape actors' (i) ability and willingness to form new social ties with other actors and (ii) propensity to "activate" pre-existing social ties. Our results show that many new social ties were established in both events, but also that pre-existing ties comprised a considerable proportion (54–82%) of all ties in use. Using exponential random graph models for temporal networks, we demonstrate that two actors that are working with or have previously worked with a common third actor are more likely to activate pre-existing social ties. Further, new social ties tend to be formed around a few central actors, whereas the opposite seems to apply for the activation of pre-existing ties. The extent to which actors consider others' organizational affiliation, formal role, previous experience, and level of professionalization differs between the cases. We suggest these tie formation and activation differences can be attributed to diverging organizational contexts varying in their reliance upon self-organizing versus command-and-control approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined the principal effects of different information network topologies for local adaptive management of natural resources. We used computerized agents with adaptive decision algorithms with the following three fundamental constraints: (1) Complete understanding of the processes maintaining the natural resource can never be achieved, (2) agents can only learn by experimentation and information sharing, and (3) memory is limited. The agents were given the task to manage a system that had two states: one that provided high utility returns (desired) and one that provided low returns (undesired). In addition, the threshold between the states was close to the optimal return of the desired state. We found that networks of low to moderate link densities significantly increased the resilience of the utility returns. Networks of high link densities contributed to highly synchronized behavior among the agents, which caused occasional large-scale ecological crises between periods of stable and high utility returns. A constructed network involving a small set of experimenting agents was capable of combining high utility returns with high resilience, conforming to theories underlying the concept of adaptive comanagement. We conclude that (1) the ability to manage for resilience (i.e., to stay clear of the threshold leading to the undesired state as well as the ability to re-enter the desired state following a collapse) resides in the network structure and (2) in a coupled social-ecological system, the systemwide state transition occurs not because the ecological system flips into the undesired state, but because managers lose their capacity to reorganize back to the desired state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]