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Nanotechnology offers potential solutions for sustainable agriculture, including increasing nutrient utilization efficiency, improving the efficacy of pest management, mitigating the impacts of climate change, and reducing adverse environmental impacts of agricultural food production. Many promising nanotechnologies have been proposed and evaluated at different scales, but several barriers to implementation must be addressed for technology to be adopted, including efficient delivery at field scale, regulatory and safety concerns, and consumer acceptance. Here we explore these barriers, and rank technology readiness and potential impacts of a wide range of agricultural applications of nanotechnology. We propose pathways to overcome these barriers and develop effective, safe and acceptable nanotechnologies for agriculture. Nanotechnology holds great application potential in plant agriculture. This Review Article identifies the technological readiness, addresses the primary barriers to adopting nano-enabled technologies and proposes a roadmap to advance nanotechnology-enabled agriculture.

The Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP) is proposing an ambitious agenda to assess the status of streams and estuaries in a 12-State area of the western United States by the end of 2003. Additionally, EMAP is proposing to access landscape conditions as they relate to stream and estuary conditions across the west. The goal of this landscape project is to develop a landscape model that can be used to identify the relative risks of streams and estuaries to potential declines due to watershed-scale, landscape conditions across the west. To do so, requires an understanding of quantitative relationships between landscape composition and pattern metrics and parameters of stream and estuary conditions. This paper describes a strategic approach for evaluating the degree to which landscape composition and pattern influence stream and estuary condition, and the development and implementation of a spatially-distributed, landscape analysis approach.