Multistrata agroforestry systems with tree crops comprise a variety of land use systems ranging from plantations of coffee, cacao or tea with shade trees to highly diversified homegardens and multi-storey tree gardens. Research on plant-soil interactions has concentrated on the former. Tree crop-based land use systems are more efficient in maintaining soil fertility than annual cropping systems...

Temperate agricultural practices that lower external inputs, increase potential for carbon (C) storage, and augment system resilience, particularly through agrodiversity, remain crucial to productive landscapes. Agroforestry systems, the combination of trees and crops, achieve such shifts in agricultural management, predominantly when positive interspecific interactions are optimized. Although ...

Small-holder farmers often develop adaptable agroforestry management techniques to improve and diversify crop production. In the cocoa growing region of Ghana, local knowledge on such farm management holds a noteworthy role in the overall farm development. The documentation and analysis of such knowledge use in cocoa agroforests may afford an applicable framework to determine mechanisms driving...

Climate change is a reality and will affect the poor in developing countries in many ways. The effectiveness of global change research could be substantially improved by linking International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) study with Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres based in the tropics. These centres are carrying interdisciplinary research and dev...

Agroforestry as land use based on planted trees, provides productive and protective (biological diversity, healthy ecosystems, protection of soil and water resources, terrestrial carbon storage) forest functions that societies care about in the debate on sustainable forest management. Yet, the trees planted in agroforestry systems are excluded in formal definitions and statistics of ‘forestry p...

This paper describes a multi-disciplinary project to examine the changing interactions between trees and crops as the trees in semi-arid agroforestry systems establish and mature; the project is one of the most detailed and highly instrumented long-term studies of tree and crop growth, system performance, resource capture, hydrology and microclimate ever carried out within an agroforestry conte...

Purpose: to substantiate the main provisions of landscape agroforestry reclamation. Methods: landscape-chorionic, ecotonic and catenary-basin approaches. Results. A provision on forest agrarian chorion formed by core – phytomass accumulation forestry stows reclamation fields its impact agricultural has been developed. The characteristics these depend intensity material-energy manifestations cho...

Quantifying carbon in agroforestry trees requires biomass equations that capture the growth differences (e.g., tree specific gravity and architecture) created in the more open canopies of agroforestry plantings compared with those generally encountered in forests. Whereas forest-derived equations are available, equations for open-grown trees are not. Data from destructively sampled open-grown t...

Matthew J. Helmers, Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University Thomas M. Isenhart, Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management, Iowa State University Michael G. Dosskey, USDA Forest Service, National Agroforestry Center, Lincoln, Nebraska Seth M. Dabney, USDA-ARS National Sedimentation Laboratory, Oxford, Mississippi Jeffrey S. Strock, Department of S...