Providing a guide to the cultivation of both the terrestrial and epihytic orchid species growing in South Africa, this volume includes numerous hints, illustrations and photographs to help simplify the process. Detailed growing notes are given for over 60 terrestrial and over 40 epiphytic species.

Continued population growth, rapidly changing consumption patterns and the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation are driving limited resources of food, energy, water and materials towards critical thresholds worldwide. These pressures are likely to be substantial across Africa, where countries will have to find innovative ways to boost crop and livestock production to avoid becoming more reliant on imports and food aid. Sustainable agricultural intensification - producing more output from the same area of land while reducing the negative environmental impacts - represents a solution for millions of African farmers. This volume presents the lessons learned from 40 sustainable agricultural intensification programmes in 20 countries across Africa, commissioned as part of the UK Government's Foresight project. Through detailed case studies, the authors of each chapter examine how to develop productive and sustainable agricultural systems and how to scale up these systems to reach many more millions of people in the future. Themes covered include crop improvements, agroforestry and soil conservation, conservation agriculture, integrated pest management, horticulture, livestock and fodder crops, aquaculture, and novel policies and partnerships.

Understanding diversity patterns and the effect of global change on abundance, distribution patterns and species survival are of the most discussed topics in biodiversity research. Species are disappearing worldwide, mostly due to habitat loss, but other factors like climate change are likely to increase in importance during the 21st century. Thus, one of the most worrying issues is that we still do not know the optimal abiotic and biotic requirements for population persistence of many of the still existing species, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to make appropriate recommendations for their conservation in terms of proposing an effective management of their sites. Analysis of these requirements is, however, strongly dependent on the taxonomic group considered and on life history strategies of the species that comprise the group. In this Research Topic, we concentrate on this issue applied to orchids, one of the most abundant groups of flowering plants with approximately 30,000 species. They are classified among the most threatened groups worldwide. Of the approximately 1000 species that have been evaluated, almost 60% are threatened, endangered or extinct. For a few orchid species, detailed records from monitoring efforts provide opportunities for comparative analyses of species declines through time. However, for most orchid species we still lack population data and there have been few studies that have focused on the environmental factors and species traits associated with the decline of orchid sites and species numbers.