Research, part of a Special Feature on Sustaining Ecosystem Services in Cultural Landscapes: Analysis and Management Options Balancing Ecosystem Services and Disservices: Smallholder Farmers' Use…
By Tola Gemechu Ango, Lowe Börjeson, Feyera Senbeta, K. Hylander. 2014
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Farmers' practices in the management of agricultural landscapes influence biodiversity with implications for livelihoods, ecosystem service provision, and biodiversity conservation. In this study, we examined how smallholding farmers in an agriculture- forest mosaic landscape in southwestern Ethiopia manage trees and forests with regard to a few selected ecosystem services and disservices that they highlighted as "beneficial" or "problematic." Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from six villages, located both near and far from forest, using participatory field mapping and semistructured interviews, tree species inventory, focus group discussions, and observation. The study showed that farmers' management practices, i.e., the planting of trees on field boundaries amid their removal from inside arable fields, preservation of trees in semimanaged forest coffee, maintenance of patches of shade coffee fields in the agricultural landscape, and establishment of woodlots with exotic trees result in a restructuring of the forest-agriculture mosaic. In addition, the strategies farmers employed to mitigate crop damage by wild mammals such as baboons and bush pigs, e.g., migration and allocation of migrants on lands along forests, have contributed to a reduction in forest and tree cover in the agricultural landscape. Because farmers' management practices were overall geared toward mitigating the negative impact of disservices and to augment positive services, we conclude that it is important to operationalize ecosystem processes as both services and disservices in studies related to agricultural landscapes.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/163fd2bed13df467ec09fb7fa50f16e941f64bae
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Citations in the corpus
- Soil “Ecosystem” Services and Natural Capital: Critical Appraisal of Research on Uncertain Ground (2016, background): “The same year, Schlichting (1972) introduced the concept of multi-functionality of soils and described how the buffering capacity of soils in different respects is important to a multitude of organisms and to other parts of the landscape.”