The effective management of human-dominated tropical forest landscapes is crucial in the wake of global environmental change affecting biodiversity, ecosystem functions, and the livelihoods of billions. To ensure success of such ecological management, it is essential that both planning as well as implementation is informed by long-term ecological knowledge rooted in robust scientific inquiries. Examples of science-based ecological management in tropics are rare largely due to paucity of high-resolution past ecological studies that provide policy-relevant information on timescales tangible for management frameworks. To bridge this gap in the light of India’s National Agroforestry Policy (NAP) and its wider relevance to other tropical countries, EARNEST brought state-of-the-art understanding of Indian agroforestry landscapes using a combined palaeoecological and statistical approach. Assessing the resilience of these landscapes towards past fire regimes under changing climatic scenarios, EARNEST examined their capacity to improve biodiversity and ecosystem functions, vital to socio-economic development of forest-dependent communities in India. To explore its applicability to other parts of the tropics, EARNEST used the model system, the Western Ghats of India, one of world’s prime biodiversity hotspots supporting highest human population density. Additionally, the Western Ghats forested landscapes, like many tropical regions, include community-based conservation refugia for many forest-dwelling species in the form of “sacred” forest groves, small forest fragments that receive protection from deforestation and fire management due to cultural practices. Thus, the age-old agroforestry landscapes and their co-existence with forest groves in this biodiversity hotspot provide an ideal opportunity to investigate their long-term dynamics under changing human and climatic scenarios and to assess their ability to sustain biodiversity in the light of NAP. The major research objectives that drove the project were:
I) Examining long-term transformations of tropical agroforestry landscapes of the Western Ghats
II) Assessing the importance of forest groves as cultural drivers of reforestation
III) Understanding the interplay between agroforestry landscapes and forest groves and its implications for ecological management in light of NAP
While deepening fundamental knowledge of agroforestry landscapes, EARNEST tackled a crucial aspect of the effectiveness of fires in managing these landscapes and generated new knowledge required for designing effective biodiversity conservation strategies, setting the stage for other policy-oriented outcomes. Considering the typical tropical ecological makeup of the Western Ghats rainforests, the ecological and theoretical frameworks that are covered in EARNEST (e.g. plant diversity indices, assessment of indigenous conservation strategies, resilience frameworks), could find regional as well as global analogues, thereby contributing to socio-economic well-being of developing countries in the tropics.
