The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is a CGIAR Consortium Research Centre. ICRAF’s headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, with five regional offices located in Cameroon, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Peru.
The Centre’s vision is a rural transformation in the developing world as smallholder households strategically increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve their food security, nutrition, income, health, shelter, social cohesion, energy resources and environmental sustainability.
The Centre’s mission is to generate science-based knowledge about the diverse roles that trees play in agricultural landscapes, and to use its research to advance policies and practices, and their implementation, that benefit the poor and the environment.
The World Agroforestry Centre is guided by the broad development challenges pursued by the CGIAR. These include poverty alleviation that entails enhanced food security and health, improved productivity with lower environmental and social costs, and resilience in the face of climate change and other external shocks.
The protocol for Measurement and Monitoring of Soil Carbon Stocks in Tropical Landscapes was developed under Land Health Decisions (Science Domain 4) at World Agroforestry Centre. This domain is concerned with understanding land degradation and how it can be prevented, reversed and its significance better communicated and recognised. This is within a wider landscape characterization and management approach that deals with nested and interacting biophysical and social scales. It aims to develop and promote scientifically rigorous methods for measuring and monitoring land health, assessing land health risks, and targeting and evaluating agroforestry and other sustainable land management interventions to improve soil fertility, ecosystem health and human wellbeing.
The work of the domain involves field, laboratory and modeling approaches to build robust evidence for policies, investments and practices. The Land Health Decisions SD incorporates the world-renown HQ and satellite country plant and soil labs. This SD engages most significantly with the ICRAF GeoScience Lab using its research outputs on baselines, time-series analyses and land health metrics to relate geo-referenced field data to grid-based remote sensing approaches.