et al., 2001; Reich et al., 2004; Van Ruijven and Berendse, 2005; Tracy and Faulkner, 2006).
     AKST could play a significant role in managing and enhancing present biodiversity, which is the foundation of ecosystem services, namely provisioning (e.g., food, wood, fiber, fuel) and regulating (climate and flood regulation, dis­ease control) services (MEA, 2005). There are many options for AKST to play such a role through agricultural practices and land management as well as through genetic resources preservation as long as the political and regulatory context allows it.

Biodiversity enhancement in agricultural activities and land management
To promote an ecological approach of the agroecosystems, AKST could focus on a better understanding of the impacts of different cropping and livestock systems both on the spa­tial distribution and the evolution of the overall biodiversity at the landscape level and, as well as the effect of biodiver­sity on the productivity and quality of the systems including soil and water resources. Some of the options among others are to (Jackson, 1980; Soule et al., 1992; Kerr and Cur-rie 1995; Caughley and Gunn, 1996; Johnson et al., 1996; Srivastava et al., 1996; Johnson et al, 1999; McNeely et al., 2002; Graf, 2003):
•     Design  rural  landscapes  with  biodiversity  enhance­ment in mind. This might include consideration of such critical issues as mixed and strip cropping for annual crops at the farm level, as well as the creation of mi­gration corridors and improvement in habitat quality at the appropriate scale. It could also include enhanc­ing knowledge of the functional role of nonagricultural biodiversity in achieving specific regulating services at the landscape level (pollination, pest and disease regula­tion, natural hazard protection, etc.).
•     Continue research on radical new types of agricultural production that would be based on biodiversity en­hancement while increasing productivity and offering other advantages, including reduced reliance on chemi­cal inputs, lower energy costs and reduced soil degrada­tion and erosion for example:
-     Further research and experimentation on pesticide use and pesticide hazard reduction plans (at na­tional and regional level) that could result in yield gains while enhancing biodiversity and safeguard­ing human health.
-     Changes in fertilization and tillage practices that could enhance beneficial soil flora and fauna as well as alleviate the contamination of waterways that has multiple effects on wildlife. There is wide recognition of the desirability for substantial addi­tional research on both technical and policy options that ensure a wide and consistent implementation of these changes.
-     Improvements in water use efficiency through tech­nical improvements and policy tools to reduce the impact of agricultural water demands on the envi­ronment and biodiversity.
•     Better understand the role of both forests and grass­lands and their management in the preservation of bio­diversity and ecological processes.

AKST could also focus on the optimization of spatial and temporal management of crops and livestock biodiversity at the landscape level and as part of a global agroecosystem (Loreau et al., 2003) to contribute to the sustainability of the whole system by:
•     Better understanding the effect of spatial and tempo­ral distribution of varieties (for example among crop plants possessing different pest resistance genes) and the associated organizational and technical practices on the evolution of both pathogen and pollinator commu­nities at the landscape level. This requires the under­standing of the biological mechanisms of host-pathogen co-evolution and their susceptibility to a fluctuating environment;
•     Improving knowledge on the diversification of produc­tion and associated practices and its effect on the produc­tivity as well as on the supply of environmental services (provision of public goods, positive externalities);
•     Better understanding the spatial organization and rela­tive proportion of cultivated areas on the one hand and grassland and forests on the other as well as their inter­action with urban areas, in the study of water and fertil­izers transportation within the territory and as parts of the whole landscape living ecosystem;
•     Developing GIS tools and Multi-Agent Systems that help farmer communities and associations determine appropriate locations of various food and farming sys­tems (crops, animals, enterprise, grasslands) to improve production efficiency  and meet environmental chal­lenges including biodiversity preservation.

Genetic resources preservation
The global distribution of genetic diversity and the inter-dependency of all countries vis-à-vis genetic resources call for greatly improved cooperation and coordination mecha­nisms at the global as well as the local level. Much work will be required in order to upgrade, rationalize and coordinate the global design for ex situ collections (based on local, na­tional and regional genebanks): the Future Harvest Centers and the Global Conservation Trust could play a major role in the coordination and support of all the components of such design. This effort has to be accompanied by a more systematic characterization, evaluation and documentation of genetic resources to allow their wide use.
     Today, there is a strong scientific consensus that the viability of genetic resources in agriculture depends on in situ preservation efforts that allow the development of re­sources' adaptative capacities and act as a complement to ex situ stored collections. These must be carried out in a large variety of ecological and cultural circumstances that can only be achieved through international cooperation and funding. So, in addition to the static conservation of genetic resources, more attention could be paid to the dynamic pro­cesses that allow potential evolution in changing environ­ment through in situ preservation.
Considering livestock, it will be important to:
•     Understand better the evolution of genetic diversity in intensive and extensive breeding populations and develop tools to monitor and control the genetic drift within such populations.
•     Develop specific and breeding efforts on locally adapted