Research partnerships

The development of ecoagriculture landscapes is essential to addressing the dual challenge of enhancing wild biodiversity in critical habitats and improving rural livelihoods of agriculture-dependent people. As illustrated by the many examples in this volume, there is considerable scope for local innovations through collective action and local trial and error. But in many landscapes, there is no clear pathway to ecoagriculture solutions, and developing them will re- quire integrating the efforts of scientists with a range of disciplinary expertise, interacting closely with land users. There remain major gaps in knowledge to overcome major tradeoffs and achieve real synergies between biodiversity and agricultural livelihoods. There is thus a need for large-scale research initiatives in major ecozones to understand how agroecosystems function and to identify opportunities and constraints for ecoagriculture under diverse conditions. But conventional re- search approaches are inadequate. Few existing research methods are adapted for application in complex and dynamic landscape mosaics. The agricultural and conservation research communities are weakly linked, and their research frameworks are often incompatible. Disciplinary research priorities often fail to address the major constraints of field practitioners (Rhodes and Scherr 2005).

---

• View source