Project: Impacts of Conservation Agriculture on Macrofauna diversity and related Ecosystem Services for improved farmers‘ cropping systems and livelihoods in Highlands of Madagascar
The CAMES project proposes to gather soil and crop scientists from 5 different Malagasy and French institutions already working together in Madagascar around the original thematic of the soil macrofauna and the ecosystem functions it performs in Conservation Agriculture CA systems. Apart scientific objectives, the consortium aims at strengthening research capacity about the intensification of soil ecological processes for a sustainable agriculture in poor tropical countries. As a consequence, a large part of the budget will be used to develop research and to teach young researchers to this thematic. The objectives of the project are: - to determine which CA-related agronomic factors are associated with changes in the structure, abundance and biomass of macrofauna functional groups (WP1); - to assess the effects of CA systems on soil macrofauna functional diversity (ecosystem engineers vs bioagressors), and on some ecosystem services, i.e., carbon sequestration, soil erosion, crop production, water storage, and control of white grubs infestation and damages across three agroecological zones of the Madagascar Highlands (WP2); - to study experimentally the effect of soil macroinvertebrates (so-called ecosystem engineers) on the recycling, acquisition and transfer of nutrients to plants, maintenance of soil structure, decomposition of plant residues, under a gradient of temperature and soil water content in order to determine the effects of climate change on macrofauna activity, which will be an original scientific output (WP3); - and, to a lesser extent, to determine with different categories of farmers, through participatory Learning action research and gender analysis, the constraints and benefits of the CA technologies to ensure social and environmental sustainability and devise with them recommendation domain to ensure social acceptance of the best bet CA technologies and find scaling up strategies (WP4). Expected results of the CAMES project will help to understand the soil functioning in CA systems from the Highlands of Madagascar and to propose agricultural practices which both ensure income and livelihoods to farmers, and intensify soil ecological processes in order to provide ecosystem services in a sustainable way.
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