Monday, September 9, 2013
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
on the thesis front...Matthias
FROM MATTHIAS
Like Asantewaa, I am working in ethiopia on the trees for food security project guided by the powerful World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF). This may also be the reason why things are more or less well organized and objectives are quite clear. However, I am in another site of the project and having a slightly different focus. In general, I am also looking on local knowledge about the impact of trees on soil fertility but I am having a focus on the different soils in the landscape. I am trying to explore the soil part by integrating a methodology about identifying local soil quality indicators, developed by Edmundo Barrios (link). I am lucky that I am attending a workshop by him and other ICRAF people about participatory experimental research design right in this moment. The overall methodology has been developed by our guru Fergus Sinclair and is called AKT5. AKT5 is a program that is designed to store, organize and analyze local knowledge. In order to get the information, which we will add to the database, we conduct many interviews with farmers and thus squeeze the information out of them. In the end the data will be used to get an idea about the knowledge of farmers and how to complement to this knowledge as well as serving as a base for designing appropriate interventions.
I have been working at my site for one month and I am now at a point where I have to analyze what I have got and focus more on specific issues. I am struggling a little bit in this case because there are many interesting issues in the area but I have to take care that they produce valuable data for the project. I do also have to enter all the information obtained by farmers into the complicated language of the program, which is not fun at all. However, I believe the communication barriers I am facing by using a translator are much bigger and often more exhausting than anything else. After the project I will go to the headquarter of ICRAF in gangster town Nairobi and start analyzing soil samples and data.
Even though I am pretty much on my own in the field, I get pretty much support by the organization and the supervisors. It is always interesting to talk to other researchers of ICRAF (like in this workshop) and get an idea about future working oportunities. However, sometimes I feel a little bad when people are telling me about possible phDs or working oportunities and I just picture myself relaxing big time after handing in my master-thesis.
Like Asantewaa, I am working in ethiopia on the trees for food security project guided by the powerful World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF). This may also be the reason why things are more or less well organized and objectives are quite clear. However, I am in another site of the project and having a slightly different focus. In general, I am also looking on local knowledge about the impact of trees on soil fertility but I am having a focus on the different soils in the landscape. I am trying to explore the soil part by integrating a methodology about identifying local soil quality indicators, developed by Edmundo Barrios (link). I am lucky that I am attending a workshop by him and other ICRAF people about participatory experimental research design right in this moment. The overall methodology has been developed by our guru Fergus Sinclair and is called AKT5. AKT5 is a program that is designed to store, organize and analyze local knowledge. In order to get the information, which we will add to the database, we conduct many interviews with farmers and thus squeeze the information out of them. In the end the data will be used to get an idea about the knowledge of farmers and how to complement to this knowledge as well as serving as a base for designing appropriate interventions.
I have been working at my site for one month and I am now at a point where I have to analyze what I have got and focus more on specific issues. I am struggling a little bit in this case because there are many interesting issues in the area but I have to take care that they produce valuable data for the project. I do also have to enter all the information obtained by farmers into the complicated language of the program, which is not fun at all. However, I believe the communication barriers I am facing by using a translator are much bigger and often more exhausting than anything else. After the project I will go to the headquarter of ICRAF in gangster town Nairobi and start analyzing soil samples and data.
Even though I am pretty much on my own in the field, I get pretty much support by the organization and the supervisors. It is always interesting to talk to other researchers of ICRAF (like in this workshop) and get an idea about future working oportunities. However, sometimes I feel a little bad when people are telling me about possible phDs or working oportunities and I just picture myself relaxing big time after handing in my master-thesis.
Monday, April 29, 2013
on the thesis front...Alan
It's thesis time for the second year sudents. We've been keeping a bit in touch and the stories all seem to match, a bit of chaos, a bit of nervousness, some frustation and expectations, and oh yeah...even research; maybe we should call it the 'research process', fun. I clarify, we're sort of in the beginning-middle of it, so at the stage between planning and doing fieldwork (the wake up call).
Anyway, we'll share a bit here and there of what we're up to.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The decision to go to Bangor was because of its Agroforestry programme, and with a bit of luck I landed an opportunity to work with coffee agroforestry systems in Central America. Speaking Spanish helps, for sure!, specially doing local knowledge work and interviewing lots of coffee producers. I'm currently in the north-central high valleys of Nicaragua, focusing in the region around a nature reserve called Peñas Blancas . You can imagine the landscape, a mosaic of agriculture (maize, beans, potatos, coffee, bananas, taro), livestock pastures, abandoned (even shifted) fields, patches of forest, roads and communities. I've yet to see a sloth, maybe soon now that the rains have started and it's a bit cooler. The whole socioeconomic context is intriguing, a conservation agenda working to save and restore the water service provided by the massive stone and forest mountains; the most productive coffee region in the country, the main national export commodity, with farmers vulnerable to global coffee prices and a fungus disease that wiped out entire farms last season; smallholders and huge coffee estates; national organizations and international donors trying their best; failing and succesful farmer cooperatives, a social democratic political party with a strong presidential leadership, numerous evangelical churches, etc...really interesting to say the least, and really welcoming and amazing people basing their livelihoods on the "brown gold". But anyway, I'm working with trees, that is farmer's perceptions of tree attributes and characteristics, how they classify them, what services they provide to them, what species they use, why, an what they know from observation and experience with working with trees on their coffee farms. So if you take a look, it would be hard to miss the guabas (Inga spp.), bananas and wood tree species that are intercropped with coffee or placed somewhere else in the farms and landscape. As for methods, I'm mainly doing some semi-structured interviews and a tree-attribute ranking exercise with coffee producers, which will additionally feed into an existing knowledge base started a few years back. That's what ICRAF is interested in finding out, and that's where I fit in the whole picture.
Anyway, we'll share a bit here and there of what we're up to.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The decision to go to Bangor was because of its Agroforestry programme, and with a bit of luck I landed an opportunity to work with coffee agroforestry systems in Central America. Speaking Spanish helps, for sure!, specially doing local knowledge work and interviewing lots of coffee producers. I'm currently in the north-central high valleys of Nicaragua, focusing in the region around a nature reserve called Peñas Blancas . You can imagine the landscape, a mosaic of agriculture (maize, beans, potatos, coffee, bananas, taro), livestock pastures, abandoned (even shifted) fields, patches of forest, roads and communities. I've yet to see a sloth, maybe soon now that the rains have started and it's a bit cooler. The whole socioeconomic context is intriguing, a conservation agenda working to save and restore the water service provided by the massive stone and forest mountains; the most productive coffee region in the country, the main national export commodity, with farmers vulnerable to global coffee prices and a fungus disease that wiped out entire farms last season; smallholders and huge coffee estates; national organizations and international donors trying their best; failing and succesful farmer cooperatives, a social democratic political party with a strong presidential leadership, numerous evangelical churches, etc...really interesting to say the least, and really welcoming and amazing people basing their livelihoods on the "brown gold". But anyway, I'm working with trees, that is farmer's perceptions of tree attributes and characteristics, how they classify them, what services they provide to them, what species they use, why, an what they know from observation and experience with working with trees on their coffee farms. So if you take a look, it would be hard to miss the guabas (Inga spp.), bananas and wood tree species that are intercropped with coffee or placed somewhere else in the farms and landscape. As for methods, I'm mainly doing some semi-structured interviews and a tree-attribute ranking exercise with coffee producers, which will additionally feed into an existing knowledge base started a few years back. That's what ICRAF is interested in finding out, and that's where I fit in the whole picture.
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| Coffee with a little help from the mulch of bananas and the shade of guabas. |
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| - "Seen any suspicious logging activity?", - "Ahhh, nope" |
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| Doing the tree ranking exercise under the shade of a malay apple tree. |
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Bale Mountains, Ethiopia and PFM
To those of your interested in participatory forest management or an amazing place to go trekking, consider the Bale Mountains in Oromia, Ethiopia.
There's a National Park working on conservation and responsible tourism, and on the west end over by Dodola a community trekking project, namely an Integrated Forest Management Project (IFMP), has been in place for quite some years now. I'm sure there's been some research on it, and would make for a great location for a thesis on participatory forest management.
There's a National Park working on conservation and responsible tourism, and on the west end over by Dodola a community trekking project, namely an Integrated Forest Management Project (IFMP), has been in place for quite some years now. I'm sure there's been some research on it, and would make for a great location for a thesis on participatory forest management.
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| Silvopastoral system. |
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| Farms on plateau, with access to the forest just below. |
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Agroecological Knowledge Toolkit - Training in Adama, Ethiopia
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| Presenting the 'resources map' prepared by the farmers. |
Asantewaa, Mathias and Alan, SUTROFOR 2nd year students currently at Bangor, attended a recent training course on the agroecological knowledge toolkit at Adama, Ethiopia. We learned plenty on local ecological and managemet knowledge, field participatory rapid appraisal techniques, the AKT software, and of course, Ethiopian cuisine =). We were joined by professionals from Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya and the U.K., a great group ready to put this new tool into practice.
To learn more about this, check out the AKT website lead by a team of researchers from Bangor University. Here are some pictures from the the Ejersa Joro kebele were we 'learned by doing'. Cheers.
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| Storing teff straw under the protection of acacias and live fence euphorbias. |
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| Trees need to be planted with heavy protection due to free-grazing livestock during the dry season. |
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| Cow dung patties used as fuel; in a drylands agroecosystem, biomass is a precious resource. |
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| Grazing dromedaries herded by another social group. |
Sunday, February 24, 2013
message from Anne-Grethe
Anne-Grethe asked me to post the following message to you. As the Head of the Erasmus Mundus Secretariat, she has worked hard to make SUTROFOR the great programme that it is, but to those of us that have known her personally, we thank her for being such a wonderfully warm, engaging and welcoming person. Good luck Anne-Grethe!
-------------------------------------------------------------
Dear SUTROFOR Friends
As of March 2013, I will
take on a new position as Head of the International Office at the
Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Copenhagen University.
Since 2006, I have worked
with Erasmus Mundus students from all over the world – it has been a
great job! I have enjoyed getting to know all of you and following your
adventures in Copenhagen, Bangor, Dresden, Padova
and Montpellier.
I wish you all the best in
your future lives. I am sure that the SUTROFOR programme has given you
not only an excellent education, but also a precious worldwide network
of friends and very valuable intercultural skills,
that will prove helpful when entering the global job market.
I send you my warmest greetings!
Anne-Grethe
Monday, February 4, 2013
voilà Montpellier -an extension to the impression-
Phil recently wrote a comment to his previous post on Montpellier, and since it's kinda hidden somewhere in the blog, I thought I'd re-post it right here. Thanks again Phil, good news for those that are on track to Montpellier!
Hey,
here is an extension to this first and quite critical impression. The courses I had in the meantime are really quite the opposite of the ones before. They really seem to be in their comfort zone with social sciences here and the courses negotiation (for env. resources) and nature politics as well as some other social course, which I cant be bothered to look up right now, are really interesting and definitely new land for me. Here the limiting factor is unfortunately still the french language. Even though I understand the stuff theoretically it is still an effort to listen and it gets hard to concentrate after a while as the density of info is pretty high. We get interesting guest speakers as well and the only negative thing is that we still dont know any exam dates.
I just wanted to let you know that my perception of Montpellier changed a bit since I last reflected on it and that it might be quite a cool place to go if you want to go deeper into social science and social science theory and if your french is quite alright to begin with. I remind you that I did not speak a word before starting the course with the fild trip to french guyana...
Ciao
Phil
Hey,
here is an extension to this first and quite critical impression. The courses I had in the meantime are really quite the opposite of the ones before. They really seem to be in their comfort zone with social sciences here and the courses negotiation (for env. resources) and nature politics as well as some other social course, which I cant be bothered to look up right now, are really interesting and definitely new land for me. Here the limiting factor is unfortunately still the french language. Even though I understand the stuff theoretically it is still an effort to listen and it gets hard to concentrate after a while as the density of info is pretty high. We get interesting guest speakers as well and the only negative thing is that we still dont know any exam dates.
I just wanted to let you know that my perception of Montpellier changed a bit since I last reflected on it and that it might be quite a cool place to go if you want to go deeper into social science and social science theory and if your french is quite alright to begin with. I remind you that I did not speak a word before starting the course with the fild trip to french guyana...
Ciao
Phil
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Food & Forests: Cultivating Resilient Landscapes
Resilience again!...OK, this conference is definitely sooner than the other one I posted previously, even too soon as it's on the 24-26th of January already, so this Thursay and Friday. Good news is they'll be doing a free online broadcast, nice! Should be quite interesting.
You can check the conference schedule, information and livestream link at:
You can check the conference schedule, information and livestream link at:
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Stephen Ngowi
Hey guys,
This is for the current second year students who were on the JSM in the East Usambara mountains this summer. I've just been told by Thorsten that our friend and the organizer of pretty much the whole trip in Tanzania, Stephen Ngowi, passed away on Sunday due to health complications. He was a great guy and I hope he rests in peace.
This is for the current second year students who were on the JSM in the East Usambara mountains this summer. I've just been told by Thorsten that our friend and the organizer of pretty much the whole trip in Tanzania, Stephen Ngowi, passed away on Sunday due to health complications. He was a great guy and I hope he rests in peace.
Friday, January 11, 2013
CoFCCLoT
A bit of satire and a modest proposal from two authors and the Coalition of Financially Challenged Countries with Lots of Trees (!), seems appropriate for the sutrofor experience, quite funny (and not at the same time).
check out this commentary in Biotropica, as surely some of these thoughts have crossed your mind.
or maybe a bit on farmland abandonment and rewilding ecosystems...
check out this commentary in Biotropica, as surely some of these thoughts have crossed your mind.
(Meijaard and Sheil, 2011)
or maybe a bit on farmland abandonment and rewilding ecosystems...
(Navarro and Pereira, 2012)
cheers
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Resilience!
Cool conference coming up, just in case you're interested in 'resilience thinking' and/or the south of France in May. I would definitely consider going, but I (and likely the rest of the 2nd years) will probably out doing fieldwork. Anyway, if anybody is really interested maybe something could be arranged for support, it is after all...in Montpellier ;)
From their website:
"The aim of Resilience 2014 is to reinforce and explore the link between the resilience thinking and development issues. Although the concepts of Adaptation, Transformation and Development are central and common to several research communities, including Resilience, Ecological economics, and Farming systems, Territorial Development (among others), the opportunity to articulate their specific paradigms, concepts and methodologies are few. Complex problems require a diversity of approaches that can inform each other, generate a constructive debate and eventually lead to more suitable solutions. Besides, the diversity of viewpoints of the representatives from government, business and other major actors from various countries will add to the academic debate on the challenges facing societal development."
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