Agroforestry in Europe

Agroforestry in Europe
Author: Antonio Rigueiro-Rodríguez
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2008-11-09
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 140208272X

Agroforestry has come of age during the past three decades. The age-old practice of growing trees and crops and sometimes animals in interacting combinations – that has been ignored in the single-commodity-oriented agricultural and forestry development paradigms – has been brought into the realm of modern land-use. Today agroforestry is well on its way to becoming a specialized science at a level similar to those of crop science and forestry science. To most land-use experts, however, agroforestry has a tropical connotation. They consider agroforestry as something that can and can only be identified with the tropics. That is a wrong perception. While it is true that the tropics, compared to the temperate regions, have a wider array of agroforestry systems and hold greater promise for potential agroforestry interventions, it is also true that agroforestry has several opportunities in the temperate regions too. Indeed, the role of agroforestry is now recognized in Europe as exemplified by this book, North America, and elsewhere in the temperate zone. Current interest in ecosystem management in industrialized countries strongly suggests that there is a need to embrace and apply agroforestry principles to help mitigate the environmental problems caused or exacerbated by commercial agricultural and forestry production enterprises.

Tropical Agroforestry

Tropical Agroforestry
Author: Alain Atangana
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 940077723X

Agroforestry is recognized as a sustainable land-use management in the tropics, as it provides environmental-friendly ecosystems; it also provides people with their every day need for food and cash. Since the recognition of agroforestry as a science, curricula have been developed for agroforestry programs for undergraduate and graduate trainings in Universities. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop and make available educational material. This textbook strives to provide up-to-date information on tropical agroforestry to serve as educational material in the tropical context. The authoritative textbook of Nair (1993) on agroforestry was published 18 years ago, and before the advent of tree domestication, an important agroforestry practice today. In addition, many other research activities, such as carbon sequestration and integrated pest management, have been included in the agroforestry agenda. This textbook is intended for agroforestry students, teachers, and practitioners.

Agroforestry in Tropical Land Use with Special Reference to the Peruvian Amazon

Agroforestry in Tropical Land Use with Special Reference to the Peruvian Amazon
Author: Martti Poutanen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 70
Release: 1985
Genre: Agroforestry
ISBN:

Research report on agroforestry in the tropical zone of the Peruvian Amazonia - considers the characteristics and ecological aspects of agroforestry; looks at the evolution of agricultural production and forestry, shifting cultivation and animal production; discusses trends in and prospects for agroforestry, as well as related forestry research. Bibliography, photographs, questionnaire, statistical tables.

Agroforestry Systems in the Tropics

Agroforestry Systems in the Tropics
Author: P.K. Nair
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-01-14
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9789400925656

This book consolidates the descriptive results of a pantropical project called Agroforestry Systems Inventory (AFSI), undertaken by the International Council for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) from 1982 to 1987. Since agroforestry was a relatively new term when the project was initiated, the main objective was to increase the understanding of and provide a state-of the-art information base on existing agroforestry systems. Therefore, the project was designed to systematically collect, collate, synthesize, and dissem inate information on existing agroforestry systems in developing countries. One of the major results of the project, descriptions of existing agroforestry systems, was published as a series of articles in Agroforestry Systems. These system descriptions form the bulk of this book. Other products of the project include a microcomputer database on agroforestry systems, practices and components, and voluminous unpublished reports and records. Perhaps the title of the book is misleading in that the book does not include or cover all existing agroforestry systems in the tropics and geographical regions in the tropics. Additionally, some of the systems described are outside the tropical boul;ldaries of 23. 5" Nand S latitudes. For the purpose of this book, the word tropics is used in a general sense to also include subtropical developing countries that have agro-ecological and socio-economic character istics and land-use problems similar to those of the countries within the geographical limits of the tropical belt.

Tropical Rainforests and Agroforests under Global Change

Tropical Rainforests and Agroforests under Global Change
Author: Teja Tscharntke
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2010-02-04
Genre: Science
ISBN: 3642004938

not only for land use systems that depend on the regular supply of rain or irrigation water but also for the future development of natural rainforests as drought stress has been shown to a?ect tree growth and species composition in old-growth forests (Wright 1991, Walsh and Newbery 1999, Engelbrecht et al. 2007). A drought experiment conducted in a cacao agroforestry plantation showed that this plantation was surprisingly resilient to an induced drought of more than a year (Schwendenmann et al. 2009). However, droughts can have a strong impact on household incomes from agriculture, they strongly a?ect the vulnerability to poverty and thus have to be analyzed as important exogenous shocks to households, forcing them to adjust their behaviour and develop strategies to cope with these problems. The stability of rainforest margins is a critical factor in the protection of tropical rainforests (Tscharntke et al. 2007). At present, however, rainf- est margins in many parts of the tropics are far from stable, both in soc- economic and in ecological terms. For example, protected areas may attract, rather than repel, human settlement, which may be due to international donor investment in national conservation programs (Wittemeyer et al. 2008). An alternative hypothesis is that protected areas might be compromised if leakage takes place, that is, if impacts that would take place inside the restricted area are displaced to a nearby, undisturbed area (Ewers and Rodrigues 2008).

Directions in Tropical Agroforestry Research

Directions in Tropical Agroforestry Research
Author: P. K. Ramachandran Nair
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2013-04-18
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 9401590087

Large areas of the warm, humid tropics in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa are hilly or mountainous. Jackson and Scherr (1995) estimate that these tropical hillside areas are inhabited by 500 million people, or one-tenth of the current world population, many of whom practice subsistence agriculture. The region most affected is Asia which has the lowest area of arable land per capita. Aside from limited areas of irrigated terraces, most of the sloping land, which constitutes 60% to 90% of the land resources in many Southeast Asian countries, has been by-passed in the economic development of the region (Maglinao and Hashim, 1993). Poverty in these areas is often high, in contrast to the relative wealth of irri gated rice farms in lowland areas that benefited from the green revolution. Rapid population growth in some countries is also exacerbating the problems of hillside areas. Increasingly, people are migrating from high-potential lowland areas where land is scarce to more remote hillside areas. Such migra tion, together with inherent high population growth, is forcing a transforma tion in land use from subsistence to permanent agriculture on fragile slopes, and is creating a new suite of social, economic, and environmental problems (Garrity, 1993; Maglinao and Hashim, 1993).

Tropical Homegardens

Tropical Homegardens
Author: B.M. Kumar
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2007-04-21
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 140204948X

‘Homegardens’ are integrated tree–crop–animal production systems, often established on small parcels of land surrounding homesteads, and primarily found in tropical environments. This multi-authored volume contains peer-reviewed chapters from the world’s leading researchers and professionals in this topic. It summarizes the current state of knowledge on homegarden systems, with a view to using this knowledge as a basis for improving both homegardens and other similar multistrata agroforestry systems.