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Agroforestry in the Western Ghats of peninsular India and the satoyama landscapes of Japan: a comparison of two sustainable land use systems

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Abstract

Agroforestry in the Western Ghats (WG) of peninsular India and satoyama in rural Japan are traditional land-use systems with similar evolutionary trajectories. Some of their relevance was lost by the middle of the twentieth century, when modern agricultural technologies and urbanisation engineered shifts in emphasis towards maximising crop production. There has been, however, a resurgence of interest in traditional land-use systems recently, in view of their ability to provide ecosystem services. Both agroforestry and satoyama are thought to be harbingers of biological diversity and have the potential to serve as “carbon forests.” Carbon (C) stock estimates of the sampled homegardens in WG ranged from 16 to 36 Mg ha−1. Satoyama woodlands owing to variations in tree stocking and management conditions indicated widely varying C stocks (2–279 Mg ha−1). Agroforestry and satoyama also differ in nature, complexity, and objectives. While agroforestry involves key productive and protective functions, and adopts ‘intensive management’, the satoyama woodlands are extensively managed; understorey production is seldom a consideration. Differences in canopy architecture (multi-tiered structure of agroforestry vs. the more or less unitary canopy of satoayama) and land ownership pattern (privately owned/managed agroforestry holdings vs. community or local government or privately owned and mostly abandoned satoyamas) pose other challenges in the transfer and application of knowledge gained in one system to the other. Nonetheless, lessons learnt from satoyama conservation may be suitable for common pool resource management elsewhere in Asia, and aspects relating to understorey production in agroforestry may be relevant for satoyama under certain scenarios.

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Notes

  1. Simpson’s diversity index measures the probability that two individuals randomly selected from a sample will belong to different species and ranges between 0 and 1. The Shannon-Wiener index (Shannon’s index) accounts for abundance and evenness of the species present. The proportion of species i relative to the total number of species (pi) is calculated, and then multiplied by the natural logarithm of this proportion (ln pi). Shannon’s equitability (E) can be calculated by dividing H′ by H max (H max = ln S where S is the number of species). Equitability assumes a value between 0 and 1 with 1 being complete evenness.

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Acknowledgments

This paper, written during the tenure a visiting professorship awarded to BMK by the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science, University of Tokyo, Japan, was presented at the Ecosystem Service Assessment Series seminar of the United Nations University-Institute of Advanced Studies at Yokohama, Japan, on 19 January 2009 and in the Second World Congress on Agroforestry 2009 at Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Kaoru Ichikawa assisted in translating the Japanese language literature referenced in this article.

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  1. Department of Silviculture and Agroforestry, College of Forestry, Kerala Agricultural University, KAU P.O., Thrissur, 680 656, Kerala, India

    B. Mohan Kumar

  2. Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8654, Japan

    K. Takeuchi

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Kumar, B.M., Takeuchi, K. Agroforestry in the Western Ghats of peninsular India and the satoyama landscapes of Japan: a comparison of two sustainable land use systems. Sustain Sci 4, 215–232 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-009-0086-0

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