Dear Colleagues,

Ever since crop domestication and for the large part of the 10,000-year history of agriculture and agricultural innovation, farmers and entrepreneurs have been behind major advances in crop development, diversification, and adaptation to meet human needs and mitigate climate change. It is expected that climate change will modify the relationship between agroecosystem drivers and ecosystem services.

The 20th century witnessed major scientific breakthrough by waves of innovation with mechanical, biological, chemical, and informational technologies pioneered mainly by public and private research institutions and organizations. Continuing investment and innovation will be required to preserve past productivity gains in the face of increasing demand and to overcome ‘knowledge depreciation’ arising from biotic and abiotic stresses.

Grain and oilseed crops produce around 70% of global agricultural calories; however, due to population growth and economic mobility, their production needs to be doubled by 2050 to meet rising demand due to population growth and economic mobility, especially in developing countries.

Certainly, and due to limited land area for expansion, boosting crop yields in a sustainable manner is the viable solution to secure future food supplies and produce novel ecosystem services while reducing impact on agroecosystems. Consequently, optimized crop production, driven by a new wave of complementary innovations, including genetic, digital farming, organizational, social, and institutional developments, will be indispensable to sustainably meet future needs.

The combined impact of slowing yield growth in the world’s major grain and oilseed crops and rapid expansion of crop production area puts our global food system on an unsustainable path. While only 13% of the increase in global production of these crops came from expansion of harvested area from 1980–2002, area expansion contributed most of the increase from 2002–2014. Therefore, projected innovations for optimized grain and oilseed crops and cropping systems may have to rely on the principles of ecological intensification to achieve substantial increases in crop yields on existing farmland. This would avoid further loss of natural habitat, narrow the yield gap in developing countries, generate greater diversity of crops and cropping systems, and establish metrics to measure progress towards novel ecosystem services from optimized and sustainably-intensified cropping systems.

Colleagues with interest and expertise in the overall subject are invited to contribute research results or reviews of one or more of the following subtopics to be published in this Special Issue of the journal Agronomy.

• Novel grain and oilseed crops: diversifying the germplasm base
• Diversity, complementarity, and sustainability indicators of innovative cropping systems
• Spatiotemporal monitoring of agroecosystem indicators
• Novel agroecosystem services: complementarity vs. trade-offs
• Innovations and metrics to reduce the yield gap
• Bioinformatics for optimized productivity and nutritional quality of grain and oilseed crops
• Tools, models, and applications towards optimized grain and oilseed cropping systems

Dr. Abdullah A. Jaradat
Guest Editor

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• agroecosystems
• ecosystem services
• grain crops
• oilseed crops
• innovation
• optimization
• sustainability
• ecological intensification