CIFOR–ICRAF publishes over 750 publications every year on agroforestry, forests and climate change, landscape restoration, rights, forest policy and much more – in multiple languages.

CIFOR–ICRAF addresses local challenges and opportunities while providing solutions to global problems for forests, landscapes, people and the planet.

We deliver actionable evidence and solutions to transform how land is used and how food is produced: conserving and restoring ecosystems, responding to the global climate, malnutrition, biodiversity and desertification crises. In short, improving people’s lives.

Introduction: Agrarian change in tropical landscapes

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Agricultural expansion has transformed forest habitats at alarming rates across the globe, but especially so in tropical landscapes (Laurance et al. 2014; Shackelford et al. 2014) due to increasing global demands for food, fiber and biofuels (Tilman and Clark, 2014). This has resulted in mosaic landscapes encompassing varying levels of tree cover, human settlement and agricultural production units. The expansion of agriculture has resulted in large-scale habitat loss, fragmentation of forests and simplification of natural ecosystems, causing increases in the probability of extinction in small and isolated populations of both flora and fauna (Tilman et al. 1994), significant losses in biological diversity (Fahrig 2003; Ewers and Didham 2006; Krauss et al. 2010) and negative impacts on many ecosystem services (Hooper et al. 2005; Tscharntke et al. 2008).
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