AgroforestS – Agroforest Synthesis

Cocoa and Coffee Agroforestry Synthesis Project

Agroforestry systems have the potential to combine agricultural production with high levels of ecosystem service provisioning and biodiversity, thereby representing an opportunity for attaining multiple sustainable development goals. This is especially the case for two important cash crops farmed predominantly by smallholder farmers in the Global South: coffee and cocoa. A growing set of studies has investigated determinants of yields, ecosystem services, and biodiversity in coffee and cocoa agroforests on the plot scale. Previous syntheses primarily focused on a binary comparison between agroforest vs. monoculture, demonstrating biodiversity and ecosystem service benefits of agroforestry compared to monoculture. However, management practices within agroforests are rarely considered in quantitative synthesis, despite a wide range of applied practices concerning shade trees, labour, and agrochemical inputs. These practices are likely to result in different outcomes, but no quantitative synthesis is available for tropical coffee and cocoa agroforestry.

Furthermore, synthesis research has yet to include land-use history – that is whether an agroforest was derived from forest or open land, as this can produce very different outcomes on the ecological, economic and social aspects of cocoa and coffee systems. These two aspects – synthesis of findings within agroforestry systems and the inclusion of land-use history – represent two key innovations of AgroforestS.

People, funding, & contacts

My role: Development of idea; writing of proposal and budget; administrative and financial project management; postdoctoral research; reporting.

Group: Earth System Science group of Prof. Maria J. Santos at the Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Funding: University of Zurich Forschungskredit Grant (now called UZH Postdoc Grant)

Duration: January – December 2022

More information: Contact me!