In an effort to better manage, conserve or restore natural resources, scientists are planning to ‘zoom outward’ and take a new landscape approach that will look at environmental and economic problems on a larger scale.

Ravi Prabhu, Deputy Director General (Research) at the World Agroforestry Centre, says the first step is to get the scientific community to consider farms, livestock, patches of trees and shrubbery, forests, rivers and roads linking villages as part of a larger mosaic. “This is how people actually live. They don’t live under a tree — they live in an integrated landscape.”

According to an article in CIFOR Forests News, governments, policy makers and scientists have long been experimenting with different landscape approaches - from watershed management and biological corridors to habitat restoration – but these efforts have focused primarily on the short-term, local-scale.

Using ‘landscape management science’, researchers are trying to figure out how to feed the world and reduce poverty while protecting the environment. They are confident that a broader landscape approach will help to resolve many of the trade-offs between agriculture and conservation.

The article uses the example of trees, which have value beyond forests, such as in agricultural landscapes or grasslands. “With the huge ecological diversity globally, together with the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of people who are dependent on forests and agroforestry, it follows that the solution will only come through complex management and a diversity of research strategies.”

Read the full story: Landscape science: a way to help COP18 policymakers better manage the world’s resources