Agroforestry is one of the preferred landuse options for smallholder farms in tropical landscapes due to its ability to increase land productivity and protect soil from erosion. We investigated the impacts of agroforestry and traditional monocropping systems on the spatial patterns of soil erosion risk in three catchment areas of Claveria, the Philippines, using WaTEM/SEDEM, a spatially distributed soil erosion model. The model predicts soil loss in catchments based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) by taking into account the influences of rainfall, soil erodibility, vegetation cover and 2-dimensional variations in landscape structure. The predicted soil erosion rates were transformed into risk values in order to identify areas with higher risk for erosion. Model results indicate a large spatial variability in soil erosion risk patterns, with higher risks occurring on slopes greater than 8% on land under non-agroforestry use. The soil erosion risk maps were used to formulate site-specific agroforestry recommendations for future landscape amelioration plans.
This paper presents an assessment of land use changes and their impacts on the ecosystem in the Montado, a traditional agricultural landscape of Portugal in response to global environmental change. The assessment uses an agent-based model (ABM) of the adaptive decisions of farmers to simulate the influence on future land use patterns of socioeconomic attributes such as social relationships and farmer reliance on subsidies and biophysical constraints. The application and development of the ABM are supported empirically using three categories of input data: 1) farmer types based on a cluster analysis of socioeconomic attributes; 2) agricultural suitability based on regression analysis of historical land use maps and biophysical attributes; and 3) future trends in the economic and climatic environments based on the A1fi scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Model sensitivity and uncertainty analyses are carried out prior to the scenario analysis in order to verify the absence of systematic errors in the model structure. The results of the scenario analysis show that the area of Montado declines significantly by 2050, but it remains the dominant land use in the case study area, indicating some resilience to change. An important policy challenge arising from this assessment is how to encourage next generation of innovative farmers to conserve this traditional landscape for social and ecological values.
Improving household accessibility to basic community services can help reduce poverty in upland areas. In this study, spatial analysis with GIS was used to measure the accessibility of different household income groups to community services in the landlocked upland municipality Claveria in Northern Mindanao, the Philippines. Important community services were identified through villagers' participation in a matrix-scoring activity. Travel information was derived from key informant interviews while the geographical coordinates of sample households and important services were collected using GPS receivers. The Flowmap GIS software (version 7.2) was used to compute accessibility to services along the road network by habal-habal (two-wheel motorcycle). Outcomes from the participatory data gathering activities revealed that agricultural, educational and health facilities, as well as government services are important to the community to achieve sustainable livelihoods. Because local people perceive accessibility in terms of monetary costs, rather than distance, road distance measurements were converted into fare costs. Results of the accessibility analysis show that higher-income household groups generally incur lower mean one-way travel costs to reach important community services than poorer households. However, almost all households spend more than the daily per capita poverty threshold for the province to reach basic community services. A scenario to improve accessibility to services in the study area was investigated to emphasize the potential of GIS-based accessibility analysis in rural service planning.
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