2021 Aidee Guzman

The 2021 Distinguished ESPM Lecture by a Graduate Student Aidee Guzman will present:

From soil health to pollinator communities: the fertile grounds for agroecology in California’s San Joaquin Valley

Synopsis: In this talk, Aidee Guzman will present her dissertation research on how on-farm diversification in an intensively managed landscape can bolster below- to above-ground biodiversity, and their connections. For this work, Guzman partnered with small-scale farmers implementing diversified farming practices but are often invisibilized in the monoculture landscape of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Guzman will share research on how crop diversification can support soil health (i.e. beneficial microbes), pollinator communities (i.e. wild bees), and their interactions. She will also discuss how sociopolitical barriers may attenuate the adaptive capacity of small-scale farmers of color to ecological stressors.