Agroforestry at the Landscape Level

Abstract

417 Much of the work on agroforestry in North America has focused on six distinct practices— windbreaks, silvopasture, alley cropping, riparian and upland buffers, forest farming, and urban food forests— considering their functions, applications, and designs. These practices are typically planned and implemented for sites on individual farms and ranches to meet producer objectives, and therefore a sitescale perspective is the dominant lens through which these interventions are viewed. Incorporating a landscape perspective, however, can add significant value when designing agroforestry practices for enhancing multifunctionality. Understanding how individual sites function in the larger landscape can help identify where and how to design agroforestry practices to more effectively produce ecosystem services. A landscape framework involves looking beyond field boundaries and property lines to determine how a site is influenced by offsite conditions and how the site affects the surrounding landscape. At this broader scale, connections with other land uses become relevant, and more comprehensive landbased solutions can be developed. This chapter focuses on the application of a landscapelevel perspective to enhance delivery of ecosystem goods and services from agroforestry in order to create more resilient agricultural landscapes. The first section provides an overview of landscape ecology, the patch–corridor–matrix model, recent approaches for improving matrix quality, and the multifunctional landscape framework. The second section explores opportunities for agroforestry to contribute to a culturebased food supply that could improve human health and build on local knowledge. In the next section, an introduction to methods for assessing landscapes offers guidance for strategically placing agroforestry practices based on landscape and site conditions. Merging theory and application, a case study of the Upper Sangamon River Watershed demonstrates the value of research methods applied at the landscape scale. The final section describes how expanding landscapescale agroforestry research could help to bring greater benefits and broader implementation.