About
22
Publications
8,398
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
661
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (22)
Few land-allocation models consider the impact of off-farm income on tropical deforestation. We provide a concept to integrate off-farm income in a mechanistic multiple-objective land-allocation model, while distinguishing between farms with and without reallocation of on-farm labor to obtain off-farm income. On farms with reallocation of labor we...
Determining the desirable composition of a forested landscape and its associated ecosystem services (ES) is challenging because the solutions must reconcile the preferences of various forest stakeholders and account for uncertain data. By combining multi-objective robust optimization with an online survey of forest professionals in Slovenia (n = 13...
Given the drastic changes in the environment, resilience is a key focus of ecosystem management. Yet, the quantification of the different dimensions of resilience remains challenging, particularly for long-lived systems such as forests. Here we present an analytical framework to study the economic resilience of different forest management systems,...
Finding the optimal land allocation for providing ecosystem services, conserving biodiversity and maintaining rural livelihoods is a key challenge of agricultural management and land-use planning. Agroforestry has been widely discussed as a sustainable land-use solution and as one strategy to improve the provision of multiple ecological and economi...
Sustainable intensification of agricultural lands might reconcile the conservation of tropical forest with food production, but in-depth assessments considering uncertainty and extreme values are missing. Uncertainty prohibits mapping probabilities to potential future states or ranking these states in terms of their likelihood. This in turn hampers...
CONTEXT: Farmers are facing increasing pressure to practice multifunctional agriculture. Producing woody biomass through short rotation coppices (SRC) provides an economic opportunity for farmers to diversify their agricultural income while potentially providing environmental benefits.
OBJECTIVE: Using multi-objective, robust optimization we inves...
Forest management faces growing uncertainty concerning environmental conditions and demand for ecosystem services. To help forest managers consider uncertainty, we applied a robust and multi-criteria approach to select the optimal composition of a forest enterprise from 12 stand types. In our simulation, the forest enterprise strives for either fin...
Models are essential to assess the socio-economic credentials of new agroforestry systems. In this study, we showcase robust optimisation as a tool to evaluate agroforestry’s potential to meet farmers’ multiple goals. Our modelling approach has three parts. First, we use a discrete land-use model to evaluate two agroforestry systems (alley cropping...
Changing forest disturbance regimes pose a major challenge for current day forestry. Yet our understanding of the economic impacts of disturbances remains incomplete. Existing valuations of losses from natural disturbances commonly exclude extreme events and neglect impacts on standing timber. Here we develop a new methodology to assess the economi...
Understanding farmers' perceptions of and preferences towards agroforestry is essential to identify systems with the greatest likelihood of adoption to inform successful rural development projects. In this study we offer a novel approach for evaluating agroforestry systems from the farmer perspective. The approach couples rapid rural appraisal and...
Agroforestry has been promoted as a key forest landscape restoration (FLR) option to restore ecosystem services in degraded tropical landscapes. We investigated the share and type of agroforestry selected in an optimized landscape, accounting for a mosaic of alternative forest landscape restoration options (reforestation and natural succession) and...
Assessing pre-defined strategies remains the status quo for studies supporting silvicultural decision-making for future forest management, yet, such strategies may not fully address decision-makers’ preferences and uncertainty attitudes. We develop a continuous stand-level optimisation approach that integrates multiple decision criteria, uncertain...
Environmental studies regularly use the net present value (NPV) to value benefits and costs of projects. However, the NPV disregards whether the stream of net benefits is steady or volatile and ignores the distribution of net benefits among different groups of people. Here we test alternatives to NPV, building on two example cases: 1) We use discou...
Participatory forest management (PFM) is a major approach towards the reconciliation of biodiversity conservation and human livelihood needs. PFM was implemented around the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest (ASF), the largest remaining forest block of the East African coastal forest of southern Kenya, during the early 1990s. While forest cover has remained sta...
Agroforestry is hypothesised to increase ecological and economic functions of farms. Yet it is unclear if and how much agroforestry should be embedded in diversified farming systems to satisfy farmers' needs while potentially enhancing environmental services. To address this research gap we use a mathematical programming model to investigate the ro...
Conversion of tropical forests is among the primary causes of global environmental change. The loss of their important environmental services has prompted calls to integrate ecosystem services (ES) in addition to socioeconomic objectives in decision-making. To test the effect of accounting for both ES and socioeconomic objectives in land-use decisi...
Human dimensions are a critical part of large carnivore conservation. We investigated how the historical presence of wolves (Canis lupus) influences public attitudes toward the carnivore and its management in rural areas of Poland. From March 2016 to March 2017, we used a self-administered questionnaire to assess attitudes of rural residents (n = 2...
Integrating local and Indigenous knowledge into land-use planning and the assessment of ecosystems services requires reliable, quantitative data. We tested two approaches to obtain such data by quantifying farmer opinion of different land-covers in Eastern Panama using (1) the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and (2) a simpler ranking and scoring t...
The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between pro-environmental behaviour and two forms of emotional association: attachment to place and connectedness to nature. This relationship is explored in the context of farmers' management of native vegetation on their properties. A postal survey was conducted to measure the extent to which...
Projects
Project (1)
A major challenge of this century is to satisfy the increasing food and energy demands of a growing world population without further depleting natural resources. Agroforestry has been promoted as a way to meet these demands while providing a higher level of ecosystem services. Past research in this field has often focused on the plot level, but scientists and policy-makers are calling for multi-functional landscapes, which support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2 and 15.
This project aims to develop a mechanistic land-use modeling approach for multi-functionality, to identify the conditions under which agroforestry could contribute to reducing land-use conflicts. It will investigate the level of diversification most appropriate at the plot, farm and landscape levels to bring together public interests and farmers' objectives. For this purpose single- and multi-objective modelling approaches to optimize land-use allocation under uncertainty will be further developed. As a prototype, the approach will be developed for a typical tropical landscape at the forest frontier in eastern Panama.
A landscape level approach will first tackle the question of how much agroforestry is desirable in a landscape portfolio to achieve multiple ecosystem services while reducing trade-offs between them (multi-objective model). A farm level model will investigate how agroforestry should be designed to be an efficient part of a farm portfolio that satisfies the farmer’s (most likely economic) needs (single-objective model). The key question to answer will be whether including efficient agroforestry systems may reduce differences in the landscapes optimized from farmers' and the public perspective.
