BACKGROUND Documenting the spectrum of ecosystem management, the roles of forestry and agricultural biodiversity, TEK, and human culture for food sovereignty, are all priority challenges for contemporary science and society. Ethnoagroforestry is a research approach that provides a theoretical framework integrating socio-ecological disciplines and TEK. We analyze in this study general types of A...

BACKGROUND TEK, ecological and economic aspects of columnar cacti were studied in the Tehuacán Valley, Mexico to design sustainable regimes of fruit harvest. We analysed the amounts of edible fruit, seeds and flowers produced per hectare of cardonal, jiotillal and tetechera forests, their economic value and actual extraction rates, hypothesizing that the economic benefits of these NTFP would po...

The plains of Sumatra and Kalimantan were sparsely populated at the turn of the 19th century (less than 4 inhabitants/km2), and the local population relied mainly on shifting cultivation of upland rice. The introduction of rubber by Dutch private Estates in the 1910's triggered a radical change in the landscape but no fundamental change in farming practices, at least at the beginning, with the ...

Currently, the environmental services concept and its assessment seems the most appropriate approach to estimate, evaluate, conserve and in general make environmental use sustainable. The most well known environmental services are water purification and carbon sequestration. However, there are knowledge gaps. In the case of biodiversity, for example, evaluation has mostly been based on quantita...

The resource capture approach developed by John Monteith has been applied in studies of a wide variety of plant species and cropping systems in the tropics over the past 18 years. The purpose of this review is to highlight the progress made and the new challenges which lie ahead. The foundation for this approach was the establishment of ‘response surfaces’ for the development and growth of trop...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

Abstract Backgrounds and aims Litter protects the underlying soil, depending on litterfall decomposition, but dynamics of standing litter stock in agroforestry systems remain poorly understood. We aimed to unravel effects quality, temporal patterns, microclimate, a possible home-field advantage (HFA) across land-use gradient. Methods quantified litterfall, stock, microclimate during year (remna...