Land degradation severely impacts the supply of ecosystem services to local communities. Agrobiodiversity (ABD) is a major component of agroecosystems and can greatly contribute to their restoration. This activity aims to provide information and knowledge to support strategies for Ecosystem Services restoration. The work starting in 2015 will focus on three degraded landscapes of the Ethiopian highlands, from the northern Tigray region to the southern Oromia region, to collaboratively design and develop an interoperable system in support to the design of an ecosystem service restoration toolkit based on Agrobiodiversity. The information system will provide selected indicators/metrics, metadata, data to the ecosystem services restoration toolkit. Guidelines and analytical tools will be proposed to address multi-level intervention options for different management goals, citizen science technologies (e.g. mobile applications). Carlo Fadda leads the gender-responsive participatory research action in the Seeds4Needs sites for testing the toolkit and the germplasm. Existing data will be collected on species traits, functions and uses that will be cleaned and formatted to be processed by the existing analytical tools useful for the toolkit. It will be linked to existing frameworks for managing ecosystem services and will consist in an agrobiodiversity module interacting with other sources on soil quality (AfSIS) , water availability (IMWI) and climate. Collected information will include nutrition, as well as agromorphological functional traits for major crops. The toolkit will generate indicators at the landscape levels .
Contact Person
Elizabeth Arnaud (e.arnaud@cgiar.org)Lead Center
Partners
Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute, Sirinka Agricultural Research Centre, Amhara Regional Agricultural Research Institute, Scuola Superiore S. Anna, London School of Economics, University of Columbia, Earth Institute, Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche AgronomiqueRelated contents
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