Agroforestry World
Keith Shepherd
Keith D. Shepherd is Principal Soil Scientist and Leader of the Science Domain on Land Health Decisions at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), Nairobi, Kenya; and co-leads Information Systems in the Research Programme on Water, Land & Ecosystems of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)
Portuguese explorers began mapping the African coastline in the 15th century in an effort to dominate the international spice trade. Those early maps, though crude, had a profound effect on Africa’s history and the wellbeing of her people....
Global food and development policies are increasingly being supported by crop models, but current modelling approaches are unfit for this purpose. The models in use, many of which were developed in the 1970s and 1980s for high-input monoculture...
Research in agriculture seeks to generate new approaches or technologies that can be used to make a difference in farmers’ lives, and for the broader society. Well-designed technologies can have major positive impacts, as well as providing evidence...
Soil is the foundation of agriculture and food production. It is essential to the healthy functioning of ecosystems; storing and filtering water, providing resilience to drought and storing carbon. Yet soil degradation is widespread across the globe, occurring...
Never in the history of humankind has so much data been available; from research and surveillance data to crowd-sourced and citizen data, a staggering and growing number of digital datasets are available, often free online. But according to...
It is true that the functions that soils provide and their degradation are not very visible to the public – what is happening to the soil underfoot is not as visible as say smog due to atmospheric pollution, or algal blooms caused by excess nutrients entering our water bodies.