Dear Colleagues,

The Sustainable Development Goals have called attention to the need for the multifunctionality of landscapes that simultaneously contribute to multiple goals. In the UN decade of landscape restoration, as well as in response to the climate change urgency and biodiversity extinction crisis, an increase in global tree cover is widely seen as desirable, but its management by farmers and/or forest managers remains contested. As a dynamic interface between agriculture and forestry, agroforestry has only recently been formally recognized as a relevant part of land use (with ‘trees outside forest’) in important parts of the world—but not everywhere yet. Agroforestry research relates tree–soil–crop–livestock interactions at the plot level with landscape-level analysis of social-ecological systems and efforts to transcend the historical dichotomy between forest and agriculture as separate policy domains. An ‘ecosystem services’ perspective quantifies land productivity, flows of water, net greenhouse gas emissions, and/or biodiversity conservation and combines an ‘actor’ perspective (farmer, landscape manager) with that of ‘downstream’ stakeholders (in the same watershed, ecologically conscious consumers elsewhere, global citizens) and higher-level regulators designing land use policies and spatial zoning. Several voluntary, performance-based economic incentive mechanisms (including payments for ecosystem services, co-investment in environmental stewardship, social-ecological certification) have emerged and have been subject to action-research-based learning. A synthesis across the plot, landscape, and policy level 'theories of change' is expected to reveal further opportunities to strengthen the cross-scale linkages.

For this Special Issue, we invite case studies or synthesis papers that achieve the following:

1) Quantify change in ecosystem services in forest–agriculture interface landscapes and relate such to stakeholder concerns and farmer/manager decisions;

2) Analyze efforts to increase the feedback from external stakeholders to land use decisions (including ‘agroforestry’) within landscapes; and/or

3) Describe and analyze efforts to transcend an existing forestry versus agriculture dichotomy in land use policies.

Prof. Dr. Meine van Noordwijk
Guest Editor

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