BACKGROUND Agroforestry is a sustainable land use method with a long tradition in the Bolivian Andes. A better understanding of people’s knowledge and valuation of woody species can help to adjust actor-oriented agroforestry systems. In this case study, carried out in a peasant community of the Bolivian Andes, we aimed at calculating the cultural importance of selected agroforestry species, and...

For decades it has been assumed that the largest vessels are generally found in roots and that vessel size and corresponding sapwood area-specific hydraulic conductivity are acropetally decreasing toward the distal twigs. However, recent studies from the perhumid tropics revealed a hump-shaped vessel size distribution. Worldwide tropical perhumid forests are extensively replaced by agroforestry...

more attention and are increasingly seen as sustainable options to many of the land management practices in developing countries. In current attempts to identify methods of sustainable agricultural intensification and food production, agroforestry is put forward as a key future land-use practice due to its large potential for climate change mitigation and adaptation, as well as its role in prot...

Agricultural intensification has had unintended environmental consequences, including increased nutrient leaching and surface runoff and other agrarian-derived pollutants. Improved diagnosis of on-farm nutrient dynamics will have the advantage of increasing yields and will diminish financial and environmental costs. To achieve this, a management support system that allows for site-specific rapi...

Regulating the shade provided by overstory trees is important in the management of shaded-perennial agroforestry systems. In order to compare the merits of commonly used light-assessment techniques that could potentially be useful to farmers and extensionists and to quantify the extent of shading in multistrata agroforestry systems, understory photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) was measu...

Thanks to agroforestry, trees and hedgerows are back in numbers agricultural landscapes, where they provide many services. Agroforestry also gives pride of place wild herbaceous vegetation, often perceived as a constraint or neglected by humans. Omnipresent when the soil is not tilled, vegetation grows spontaneously at foot trees. From alley-cropping agroforestry bocage these 'little' plants pr...

Agroforestry systems (AFS) research and development (R&D) has evolved dramatically over the last 30 years in four major ways. The emphasis has shifted from the description of systems to understanding how they function; from simple mixtures of few components at field and farm levels to more complex consideration of diversity at landscape and regional levels; from researcher-designed practices to...

Statistical topics that related to agroforestry studies are discussed. These included study objectives, populations of interest, sampling schemes, sample sizes, estimation vs. hypothesis testing, and P-values. In addition, a relatively new and very much improved histogram display is described. As the title implies, I would like to discuss various statistical topics that relate to agroforestry s...