A pilot version of the Agriculture Bridge internet platform was launched this week for use by a graduate class in International Conservation at Cornell University, taught by Professor Jim Lassoie.

The students will explore four case studies on ecoagriculture that are being used to pilot test the AB learning system. A report on the test will be prepared at the end of the Fall. 

The pilot test will inform the implementation of a semester-long trial and evaluation of the AB system, in the Spring, including 10 case studies on ecoagriculture.

Sara J. Scherr, Louise Buck, Seth Shames and Jeff Milder from Ecoagriculture Partners participated at the recently concluded World Congress of Agroforestry in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ecoagriculture Partners’ President and CEO, Dr. Scherr gave a keynote address on the Congress Theme 3: Key policy issues for agroforestry on the opening day.

She called for a more integrated approach to planning and implementation that strategically aligns agricultural production, rural development and environmental policies in landscapes and nationally. She also advised researchers about how to influence policymakers more effectively.

Slides from her address are shared below.

On 26 August, Dr. Scherr shared how ecoagriculture landscapes can manage the risks of land and ecosystem degradation and facilitate land rehabilitation at the symposium on land rehabilitation and landcare. She highlighted the application of the approach and tools of the Landscape Measures Resource Center in tracking change at the landscape scale.

Slides used in here address are shared below.

On 27 August, Ecoagriculture Partners facilitated a side event titled, “Ecoagriculture Landscapes: Mobilizing Action Together.”

Nearly 30 participants join the event for an update on the activities of Ecoagriculture Partners, and to share experiences from their own ecoagriculture initiatives in different parts of the world.

Dr. Louise Buck, Coordinator of the Landscape Measures Initiative presented at the Technical Session on: "Agroforestry in landscape-scale conservation strategies" on 26 August 2009. She showed how a landscape measures approach can support collaborative design and evaluation of agroforestry in conservation strategies. Slides are shared below.

Jeff Milder presented his paper titled "Quantifying ecoagriculture: methods and proxies for tracking conservation outcomes in complex agricultural landscapes" at the Technical Session: Silvopastoral systems on 26 August 2009. The abstract is shared below.

Quantifying ecoagriculture: methods and proxies for tracking conservation outcomes in complex agricultural landscapes

Jeffrey C. Milder

Department of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA

Abstract

Throughout the tropics, regions of smallholder agriculture frequently consist of fine-grained mosaics of pasture, cropped land, human settlements, and natural and semi-natural habitat. These complex, heterogeneous landscapes are important for conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services that support rural livelihoods, yet their performance in terms of conservation, food production, and livelihood outcomes is highly variable in space and time. This heterogeneity makes it difficult to track the specific causes and consequences of landscape change and challenging to identify optimal management solutions to bring about desired conservation and production outcomes. To shed light on the key controls of conservation values in agricultural mosaics, we conducted a landscape scale analysis to evaluate the relationships between land use, vegetation characteristics, landscape structure, and biodiversity of birds and butterflies in pasture dominated mosaic landscapes of four Latin American countries: Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Colombia. This longitudinal methodology allowed us to evaluate the degree to which these relationships can be generalized across a range of geographic and socio-ecological contexts. Our results indicate that land use is an incomplete predictor of key landscape outcomes, despite its widespread use for this purpose. Site-scale vegetation characteristics and landscape context are also important predictor variables, not fully represented by land use classifications. The results reveal a promising set of cost-effective proxies for landscape outcomes, some of which can be quantified and tracked with mid-resolution ASTER imagery.

A wealth of information, presentations, and photographs from the entire congress are being shared at the World Congress of Agroforestry website: http://www.worldagroforestry.org/wca2009

Participants during an open space session

The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment hosted a day-long ‘proof of concept’ planning workshop on May 12th 2009 that brought together 25 people from 18 organizations to consider needs and opportunities for systematically advancing methods for assessing the performance of complex agricultural landscapes along production, conservation and livelihood dimensions. The workshop was organized around the Landscape Measures (LM) approach that Ecoagriculture Partners has pioneered through its Landscape Measures Initiative (LMI).  The collaboratively developed conceptual framework that underlies the approach is specified in Understanding Ecoagriculture: A Framework for Measuring Landscape Performance, Discussion Paper No. 2. Information and tools for operationalizing the approach are available from the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC), an online forum designed to aid local stakeholders and their collaborators in selecting and creating meaningful indicators, and measuring and tracking them over time. Information about the LM approach and these resources was conveyed to participants through a 45 minute slide presentation and discussion that followed the opening of the workshop. 

With this background, participants broke into Table Discussion groups to consider how the LM approach was relevant to the interests and activities of their  own organizations, how its relevance to others might be advanced, and what it may mean to ‘prove the concept’ in their respective programmatic settings.  Group reports and an analysis of the plenary presentations revealed the approach was highly relevant to the organizations present in a wide variety of ways.  They also generated a preliminary set of criteria for ensuring relevance for others and guidelines for implementing a proof of concept.

Following a congenial lunch break, participants were invited to select an Open Session group of their choice to consider in some detail how the LM approach and Proof of Concept might be applied to one of five priority challenges: 1) understanding impacts of integrative programming in rural landscapes and providing a source of information for adaptive management, 2) evaluating ecosystem service provision from rural landscapes including carbon sequestration and co-benefits, 3) improving the development and use of indicators for market eco-certification,  4) improving understanding and management of poverty-environment linkages, and 5)  improving communication and knowledge-sharing across diverse sectors and across scales.  The fifth topic was selected by no one as participants viewed it to pertain to each of the others. The four Open Session reports and the plenary ‘news briefs’  exposed a wealth of ideas and cautions for moving forward successfully with ‘proof of concept’ activity in these domains.  Furthermore, the group and plenary discussions appeared to spearhead some viable partnerships for fundraising and implementation of LM Proof of Concept activity.

A Wrap-Up session provided opportunity for participants to highlight what was foremost on their minds regarding ways to initiate and succeed at demonstrating proofs of concept for the LM approach in different institutional and geographic settings.  A fledgling PoC Leadership Group was formed to carry forward the ideas and the momentum of the participants. The workshop leadership team hopes that this report will aid the Leadership Group in fostering partnerships, proposals and work plans to transform the ideas and information generated at the workshop into useful practice.

Download the full workshop report.

A team from Cornell University, including Louise Buck, Coordinator of Ecoagriculture Partners’ Landscape Measures Initiative, and Prof. James Lassoie, EP Fellow, recently received a grant from Cornell University's Center for a Sustainable Future to explore the development of a cost-effective methodology for assessing changes in net carbon emissions, sequestration and storage, and associated co-benefits in complex agricultural landscapes.

The project will focus on developing new practical methods for tracking soil and vegetative carbon dynamics in agricultural mosaics that include multiple land uses.

The principal researchers believe that it is critical that these methods be easier to use and less expensive than spatially intensive soil and vegetative sampling and analysis, and that they can be linked to different land use patterns, hydrology, other ecosystem services and livelihood benefits.

The one-year project involves developing partnerships with other organizations pursing similar goals, including the Secretariat of the Terrestrial Carbon Group; The Heinz Center, Agriculture and Rural Development Department; The World Bank, Climate Action for Poverty Reduction Roundtable and the GEF-funded Carbon Benefits project; World Agroforestry Center, Food Security Carbon Fund for Africa project; Ecoagriculture Partners, Community Markets for Conservation (COMOCO) project; Wildlife Conservation Society, and the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets; USDA, to expand the duration and funding base for the methodology development effort.

For more details, contact Louise Buck at leb3@cornell.edu.

On May 12th the Landscape Measures group at Ecoagriculture Partners conducted a 'Proof of Concept' Planning Workshop in Washington, DC.  The workshop was hosted by the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, and facilitated by the Generative Change Community (GCC). 

The day-long meeting engaged members of some 15 international organizations who are pursuing conservation, agriculture and/or rural development goals at landscape scale, and seek to share their experience and learn more about approaches, methods and tools that can improve their practice. 

The main goal of the workshop was to initiate a process for critically examining the Landscape Measures approach and anticipating its relevance in a variety of programmatic contexts and landscape settings as a basis for further developing the approach and its supporting methods and tools.

A leadership group emerged from the workshop who will plan and initiate next steps with input from all participants.

A full report on the workshop will be posted at this site later in June.   For further information contact Louise Buck (leb3@cornell.edu)

Dear DC Ecoagriculture Working Group Members,

We hope very much that you can join us for the following session at the World Bank, in particular those of you who have been following the development of the Landscape Measures Resource Center and may have attended the workshop at our office last year. For complete details, see below:

The Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank is pleased to invite you to a workshop:

Learning from Landscapes: Tools for Engaging Stakeholders in Assessing Production, Conservation and Livelihood Options,

Wednesday, March 4,  2:00 - 5:00 pm

Address: The World Bank, 1818 H St NW, Washington DC 20433, MC-9-10

To RSVP, please send an email to Sarian Akibo-Betts at: sakibobetts@worldbank.org, cc-ing Ariela Summit at: asummit@ecoagriculture.org. 

DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION IS MARCH 2!

Details

Chair:  Erick Fernandes, Adviser, ARD (The World Bank)
Speakers:  Dr. Sara Scherr, (Ecoagriculture Partners) and Dr. Louise
Buck (Cornell University)
 
The workshop will engage members of the ARD Family in considering innovative and practical ways to engage stakeholders in assessing the performance of landscapes where goals for biodiversity and ecosystem service conservation, livelihood security and sustainable agriculture production are being pursued. Participants will become familiar with landscape scale approaches, performance criteria, indicators and measurement tools for integrating production, conservation and livelihood outcomes.  They will learn to navigate the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC)(www.landscapemeasures.org) and to participate in its ongoing development. They will gain experience in using the landscape measures scorecard and be introduced to other measurement tools. Finally, they will consider possibilities for on-going learning about landscape measures approaches and methods.

At the end of the session, participants will:

• be familiar with landscape scale approaches, performance criteria and measurement tools for integrating agriculture production, environmental conservation, and livelihood security goals
• know how to navigate and contribute to the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC) to continually improve their capacity to use measurement as an aid in planning and managing complex landscapes with multiple stakeholders.

Target audience: Field-based WB staff and partners (public, private and civic)

Format:

1. Welcome, context-setting, overview (Fernandes and Buck) (1 hour)
2. Objectives, agenda, participant introductions
3. Introduce multi-dimensional framework for assessing landscape performance
4. Introduce multi-stakeholder management in landscape assessment and planning
5. Introduce Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC), online tool (developed to address foregoing)
6. Introduce and discuss selection of landscape measurement tools and applications (1.5 hours)
7. Landscape performance scorecard
8. Participatory, multi-media tools and scenario-generation
9. Expert, GIS tools with multi-stakeholder input
10. Outline strategy for on-going learning about landscape measures approach and tools (1/2 hour)? guided discussion

Speakers Bios

Dr. Sara J. Scherr is an agricultural and natural resource economist whose career has focused on agricultural and forest policy in tropical developing countries. She is founder and President of Ecoagriculture Partners, an NGO that supports agricultural communities who manage landscapes both to increase production and incomes, and to enhance wild biodiversity and ecosystem services.  She is a member of the United Nations Environment Program Advisory Panel on Food Security and a member of the Board of Directors of The Katoomba Group and REBRAF-USA. She recently served on the Board of the World Agroforestry Centre and was a member of the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger. Dr. Scherr was through 2005 the Director of Ecosystem Services for Forest Trends, an NGO that promotes forest conservation through improved markets for forest products and ecosystem services. There she worked to develop payments for ecosystem services? including carbon sequestration, watershed protection and biodiversity conservation, including their potential benefits and risks for low-income communities. Dr. Scherr's former positions include: Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA; Co-Leader of the CGIAR Gender Program; Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.; and Principal Researcher at the World Agroforestry Centre, in Nairobi, Kenya.  She was previously a Fulbright Scholar (1976), and a Rockefeller Social Science Fellow (1985-87). Dr. Scherr received her B.A. in Economics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in International Economics and Development at Cornell University.  Dr. Scherr has published over 37 articles in refereed journals  and 13 books,  including Ecoagriculture: Strategies to Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity (with Jeff McNeely) ,  A New Agenda for Forest Conservation and Poverty Reduction: Making Markets Work for Low-Income Producers (with Andy White and David Kaimowitz), and Farming with Nature: The Science and Practice of Ecoagriculture (with Jeff McNeely).
 
Dr. Louise Buck has been a faculty member in the Department of Natural Resources http://www.dnr.cornell.edu/ at Cornell University for 15 years, and a faculty associate of the Cornell International Institute for Food Agriculture and Development (CIIFAD: http://ciifad.cornell.edu/) for 19 years. Between 1994-2004, she was also an Associate Senior Scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based at Cornell.  In these capacities Buck has developed and taught courses, coordinated interdisciplinary working groups of faculty and graduate students, and conducted collaborative research and outreach, both in the U.S. and abroad, to support innovation in integrated land use systems. Her work has focused on social learning dimensions of adaptive collaborative management systems, with applications in ecoagriculture, agroforestry, community-based forest management, and protected area management.  Presently Dr. Buck coordinates the Cornell Ecoagriculture Working Group, which cooperates with Ecoagriculture Partners to develop the scientific basis for landscape approaches to sustainable agriculture and natural resource management that integrate the goals of food and fiber production, biodiversity conservation and ecological service provision, and local livelihood support.  Dr. Buck also coordinates Ecoagriculture Partners Landscape Measures Initiative (LMI), which aims to help eco-agriculture practitioners and their scientific advisors develop methods for measuring the social, economic and ecological outcomes of landscape scale management practices.  Prior to coming to Cornell, Dr. Buck worked for a decade in East Africa and for a year in Indonesia.  In Kenya she was an Associate Scientist and Project Manager with the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) for three years. For four years she was the Regional Technical Advisor for Agriculture and Natural Resources for CARE International's Eastern and Southern African Region. She also worked in Kenya for The Beijer Institute of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, and the Mazingira Institute. She has undertaken consulting assignments for the World Bank, USAID, GTZ, IUCN, FAO, CARE International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Overseas Development Institute.

• At the 2008 IUCN's World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, the LMI conducted a workshop for conservation practitioners on ways that multistakeholder groups can assess, plan and track biodiversity conservation, agricultural production and rural livelihoods at farm, community and landscape scales. Ideas and information in the LMRC informed the dynamic workshops, and influenced participants to work on developing collaborative initiatives to learn more about the role of measurement in landscape management.
• The LMI has worked collaboratively with IUCN's Livelihoods and Landscapes Initiative (with a grant from PROFOR) for the past two years. Lessons from this work are highlighted in a special issue of IUCN's newsletter, Arborvitae entitled "Learning from Landscapes."  This special issue features principles and guidelines for working at the landscape scale.  It focusses on assessment and measurement tools that support social learning by multiple stakeholders in negotiating how to manage landscapes to generate multiple desired outcomes. Download here.
• The LMI is partnering with Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley for three years on the Agriculture Bridge project.  Agriculture Bridge will be a powerful internet platform that connects students in college classrooms with ecoagriculture practitioners in the field to enhance multidisciplinary experiential learning and collaborative problem-solving.  It will also feature ten video-enhanced, multimedia case studies on ecoagriculture from ten landscapes in six countries (China, Costa Rica, Honduras, Kenya, Uganda and the USA). www.agriculturebridge.org

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Sara J. Scherr, President of Ecoagriculture Partners will be speaking at the USAID Biodiversity and Forestry Seminar on Thursday, December 4th, 9:30-11AM.  USAID Information Center, Mezzanine, Ronald Reagan Building, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004 is the venue and all are welcome.

Seminar title: "Landscape tools for success: Strategies and methods for integrated landscape planning, action and monitoring for agricultural development, food and livelihood security, and biodiversity/ecosystem conservation"

Synopsis: The world is facing both a food security and a biodiversity loss crisis. New commodities such as diverse types of biofuels offer both threats and promises while climate change alters all land uses. Are there agricultural systems that improve productivity and reduce poverty while contributing to conservation? Ecoagriculture Partners has focused on identifying and understanding sustainable agroecosystems and have produced a tool for planning, measuring and monitoring the multiple components of these systems. An often neglected component of these systems is leadership over the long term.