Diversity Turn in Land Use Science
A recent price-boom led to the expansion of smallholder vanilla agroforestry in northeastern Madagascar, the globally most important vanilla cropping region. Here, vanilla agroforests are partly established directly inside forests and partly on fallow land forming part of a shifting cultivation cycle for hill rice production, thereby differing in land-use history. Additionally, old-growth forests of exceptional global conservation priority persist, calling for conservation action. At the same time, many people struggle to meet basic needs despite income opportunities in vanilla farming.
In the Diversity Turn project, we investigated the social, economic, and ecological consequences of this recent vanilla boom. We documented economic benefits for farmers with well yielding vanilla agroforests but also economical and social marginalization of people not involved in vanilla farming. On the ecological side, we found that old-growth forests in the regional are irreplaceable to conserve endemic taxa in particular. Within the agricultural mosaic landscape we showed that forest fragments and forest-derived vanilla agroforests are particular species rich. By bringing social-economic and ecological data together, we also documented co-benefits between agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and ecosystem services in fallow-derived agroforestry.
The project took an explicitly transdisciplinary approach with many of the research questions and methods developed in reiterative feedback loops with farmers and other local stakeholders. This approach was facilitated by working in an international interdisciplinary research team based at the University of Goettingen, the University of Antananarivo, and the Regional University Centre of the SAVA region (CURSA).
People, funding, & contacts
My role: PhD student Workpackage 9 – Biodiversity conservation; administrative and scientific management of the Workpackage 9; central role in coordinating research across Workpackages 8-10; lead author project synthesis; curator of project Twitter account.
Group: Workpackage 9 – Biodiversity, Macroecology, and Biogeography group of Prof. Holger Kreft at the Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology, University of Göttingen, Germany.
Funding: Volkswagen Foundation
Duration: 2016-2021
More information: Description of the project and further information about teams and partners: Website of the University Goettingen; Twitter: @Diversity_Turn; Project publications with my contribution: Publications