LucFRes · Land-use change and the resilience of food production systems (LucFRes)
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-02-01 → 2024-01-31
- EU contribution
- €203,149
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Land-use change and the resilience of food production systems (LucFRes)
LucFRes studied how land-use changes reshape the resilience of smallholder farming systems. As land use change constrains the future of food production in the face of climate change and human pressure on natural resources, how agricultural land use change builds or undermines farming systems and their resilience is still poorly understood. The project integrates the analysis of agricultural land-use changes from satellite remote sensing with stakeholders' perceptions of land-use futures in Southwest Nigeria, which it uses as a test case. Current Remote Sensing methods for identifying and predicting crops are challenged in intercropped farming systems because they were developed for large-scale crop monocultures. Hence, these have limited applicability in heterogeneous agricultural systems such as those dominating smallholder agriculture worldwide, especially in developing countries. In LucFRes, a Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 image-based framework was developed for mapping multiple crops and intercropping considering two growing cycles. All objectives and planned activities in LucFRes were achieved except the final stakeholder workshop as the project was terminated earlier than planned to allow the Experienced Researcher (ER) to take up an Associate Professorship. The final stakeholder workshop is planned for July 2024. The MSCA research supported the expansion of the ER’s professional network and contributed to enabling the ER to gain a position as an Associate Professor in Geomatics at Karlstad University, Sweden since November 2023.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Securing food production remains a critical challenge in many world regions. Environmental change, in particular land-use change, constrains food production especially in contexts characterised by competing land demands, high population pressure and food insecurity that got compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Land-use change has long-term impacts through land degradation which affects food production systems (FPSs). Hence, an understanding of how changing land-uses shape the resilience of FPSs is therefore urgently needed to enhance agriculture’s adaptation. LucFRes aims to examine the processes operating at the interface of agricultural land-use and food production. Agricultural land-use change will be characterised in terms of the change intensities and the driving factors using Intensity Analysis, a spatially explicit, land change accounting framework. Relevant land-based resilience indicators for FPSs will be identified and validated with stakeholders for Southwest Nigeria. The combination of the satellite remote sensing-based land-use change intensities with stakeholders’ perspectives of likely land-use changes will provide the empirical-basis for modelling FPSs behaviour under changing policy and land management scenarios. To better optimise agricultural land-use change, the modelling will account for trade-offs and options for enhancing synergies between food production and other land uses. Thematically, LucFRes goes beyond the impacts of land-use on agricultural productivity by examining how changes in agricultural land-use build or undermine the resilience of food production systems in Southwest Nigeria, an area that have received little research attention. LucFRes’ integrative and policy-oriented approach will develop trajectories for enhancing the resilience of food production systems in Southwest Nigeria. Conceptually, it will provide a methodology for assessing the resilience of food production systems that is applicable to similar world regions.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITAET BERN · BernCoordinatorSwitzerland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union