Download Terms of Reference - ASB Partnership for the Tropical Forest Margins

Activity 3. Landscape typology for the humid tropics.
Terms of Reference
Introduction / context
ASB has made important contributions towards clarification of tradeoffs between the
welfare of poor rural households and global environmental concerns. However,
hydrological, ecological and other environmental services at the watershed/landscape
level have been a significant gap in this analysis in terms of impacts on local people,
priorities of key policymakers and in their potential complementarity with global
environmental objectives. ASB seeks to fill this gap by developing replicable assessment
techniques and policy-relevant databases on local environmental services that underpin
the sustainability, resilience and stability of rural production systems at various scales.
These methods and databases will build on and extend ASB’s repertoire of data and
experience to assess global environmental concerns, agronomic sustainability, household
socioeconomic concerns, institutional options and opportunities for policy reform.
A new working group on sustainable ‘mosaics’ of land uses will implement ASB’s work
within a broader landscape context. Practical, policy-oriented research on landscape
mosaics is important for several reasons:
 Land uses are distributed across the landscape in a mosaic, and the components of
this mosaic interact in a complex and non-additive manner. For example, a farmer’s
field may have high, above-ground biodiversity richness, while an entire landscape of
similar fields could result in relatively low biodiversity richness across that landscape.
Understanding and predicting landscape-level effects is therefore not simply a
question of extrapolating farm-level data to broader spatial scales through addition of
farm level effects.
 Land-use mosaics provide different functions to households and communities, each
with their own goals and needs. The short- and long-term dynamics of these mosaics
and their components are influenced by complex social, economic, institutional, and
biophysical factors.
 Land-use mosaics have direct and indirect impacts on a range of different
agroecosystem functions, and the aggregate effect of the interactions determines both
social and environmental sustainability within a landscape and a region.
Spatial analysis is needed to identify the coincidence of poverty and these systems in
order to assess their potential to contribute to poverty reduction strategies as well as
assess what options are lost by the poor if these systems and the related livelihood
options disappear. Although there have been a number of site-specific studies of systems
in isolation, there is a great need is for comparative valuation of products from land use
alternatives (e.g., managed forests compared with agroforests and simple tree-based
systems). To complement these, replicable, low-cost methods are needed to assess a
broader range of values of these products and opportunities from the perspective of local
people, particularly how their perceptions of these values change in response to economic
and environmental shocks. Finally, simulation models are needed to extrapolate results.
An operational landscape typology for the humid tropics is a prerequisite for each of
these research activities.
Goal(s) / research hypothesis
How would changes in landscapes affect global biodiversity conservation objectives,
regional watershed functions, and local livelihoods? Although there is significant
variation among sites, ASB research indicates that some important patterns hold across
continents. The ultimate goal of this activity is to identify generalizable results that can
guide project formulation and policy analysis under a broad range of circumstances in the
humid tropics. An important underlying assumption is that a useful landscape typology
spanning the humid tropics can be derived from coarse-scale data on physiography,
biodiversity, hydrology, and human population density.
Hypothesis for Activity.3. A landscape typology can be used in comparative research at
global, meso, and local scales to identify environmental problems and opportunities for
extrapolation and/or adaptation of policy, institutional, and technological innovations.
Tasks
A key assumption of this activity is that individuals with specialized expertise are willing
to collaborate. The activity leader, in consultation with leaders of other activities, will
identify and seek involvement from key collaborators with experience in biodiversity
assessment, tropical ecology, and rural livelihoods.
Through consultation among collaborators, experts in biodiversity, tropical ecology, and
rural livelihoods will synthesize existing methods and literature; identify gaps; develop a
spatial typology – including the human context – of landscapes for the humid tropics
based on spatial databases and analytical models (e.g., physiography, hydrology, digital
elevation models, biodiversity transects; plant functional types); and prepare hypotheses
to be tested empirically on how watershed functions, biodiversity conservation, and
human livelihoods (productivity, profitability, sustainability, and other criteria identified
in previous work by ASB and others) differ across landscape types.
The activity leader will organize and convene a meeting of the ASB ‘sustainable land use
mosaic’ (SLUM) working group and other collaborators from within and outside ASB
who are experts on land use and landscape ecology in the humid tropics to work to
develop and make plans to apply the landscape typology. (Money budgeted for this
meeting could be used for more than one meeting or for individual consultancies, or some
combination of these options, at the discretion of the activity leader in consultation with
the global coordinator and the World Bank project manager.)
The activity leader, who also leads the ASB SLUM working group, will coordinate with
other activities in this project and other ASB working groups to incorporate results as
they are available.
The activity leader will contribute to ASB global publications.
Deliverables
A series of consultations culminating in a workshop will produce:
3.a. A multi-authored manuscript (review article for a journal or a book chapter)
identifying a preliminary typology of landscapes for watersheds in the humid tropics.
(Although beyond the scope of this activity, additional funding will be sought so that a
range of participatory tools--workshops, interviews, transects, mapping, etc.—can be
used to validate this typology and elicit and analyse farmers’ perspectives, objectives and
decision-making mechanisms concerning sustainable land uses.)
3.b. Based on the landscape typology and outputs of Activities 2 and 3, extrapolation
domains for meso-level studies in Montane Mainland SE Asia and Central America and
micro case study in El Salvador.
3.c. Based on the landscape typology and outputs of Activities 2 and 3, recommendations
regarding selection, validation, and extrapoliation of additional sites for meso and micro
studies.
3.d. A conceptual framework, sampling approach, and strategy for securing co-financing
for planned studies of functional value of biodiversity at the landscape level by ASB.
Schedule: Because outputs of Activities 1 and 2 are needed for Activity 3, it will be
planned to occur by June 2002, in time to inform ongoing work on Activity 4 (in
Montane Mainland SE Asia and in Central America) and Activity 5 (El Salvador case
study).
Team members (CVs attached)
Stephan Weise (leader)
Meine van Noordwijk
Thomas P. Tomich
Stan Wood
Ken Chomitz
Budget (by calendar semester, Jan- June; July-Dec)
Line item
Research personnel
Meeting
Other costs
Subtotal
Total: USD 86658
2001 / I
2001 / II
0
0
2002 / I
39858
45500
1300
86658
2002 / II
0