FAO has accorded food security and sustainable livelihood a high priority since the Rio Summit and more recently in response to the declaration of the World Summit on Sustainable Development. On its part, the FAO Forestry Department in collaboration with partners, has launched a number of initiatives to assist developing countries, particularly those with low forest cover, designing and strengt...

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...

Agroforestry integrates woody perennials with arable crops, livestock, or fodder in the same piece of land, promoting more efficient utilization resources as compared to monocropping via structural and functional diversification components. This integration trees provides various soil-related ecological services such fertility enhancements improvements soil physical, biological, chemical proper...

The present study investigates the relations between statistical measures of TerraSAR-X backscatter coefficients and field inventory measures for tropical agroforestry systems in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. The background of the study is to evaluate the potential of spaceborne SAR missions for the spatially explicit estimation of horizontal and vertical structure elements of land use systems i...

Soils have many ecological functions and provide various ecosystem services including support for global food fuel production. However, FAO reports indicate that approximately one-third of the planet’s arable lands show levels degradation from processes soil erosion, low nutrients, acidification, salinization, compaction, sealing, contamination. These conditions are also found in Brazil where i...

Agroforestry has been widely practiced in the Loess Plateau region of China because of its prominent effects in reducing soil and water losses, improving land-use efficiency and increasing economic returns. However, the agroforestry practices may lead to competition between crops and trees for underground soil moisture and nutrients, and the trees on the canopy layer may also lead to shortage o...