Biodiversity Synthesis Project

Partners

University of British Columbia

overview

An analysis of data from the FARMS for Biodiversity and Carasso projects as part of a larger study with a group of 13 researchers working in different sites around the world to study agricultural diversity patterns, drivers and outcomes globally.

The principal investigators for this project are Zia Mehrabi and Claire Kremen at UBC. This is an interdisciplinary study done by analyzing and synthesizing data from ~20 preexisting empirical studies across North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. It seeks to answer the following questions:

1.     What are the benefits, costs, tradeoffs and synergies of agricultural diversification on multifunctional outcomes such as biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human health and well being for farmer livelihoods?

2.     To scale benefits versus costs, is there a difference between an area containing one large farm growing a diversity of crops or one containing small farms each growing monocultures? If so, what?

3.     How exactly do land reform policies, markets, subsidies, and risk sharing influence observed patterns in agricultural diversity we see today?

We are involved in this study in two ways:

1.     We will be doing a quantitative regional analysis using Malawi data from FARMS for Biodiversity and Carasso data sets. Our aim is to learn the circumstances under which agriculture achieves positive, sustainable outcomes for people and nature.

2.     I am co-leading, with Hannah Wittman at UBC, a qualitative synthesis of data sets. We are looking at the following questions:

·      What are the factors that encourage or inhibit farmers from using agroecological methods for diversification, across scales?

·      What are farmers perspectives on/ perceptions of / experiences with agroecology/ and diversification (including perceived outcomes)?

·      What are the processes/ pathways by which people move to/from one state to another?

Sidney Madsen and Jeff Liebert are working on this project.