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Using social and biodiversity sciences to co-design restoration for biodiversity and people in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania

Pfeifer Marion¹, Sallu Susannah M², Lauren Barnes¹, Eleanor Durrant¹, Zarah Pattison³, Evodius Ishengoma⁴, Sergio Guerreiro-Milheiras^1,5, Deo Shirima^4,6,, all workshop participants

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Add on funding by

Key funding by

Core team members

Partners

Natural England

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Restoration for biodiversity AND people

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“A just and effective approach to restoration begins by working with the people who live on and make a living from the land to identify their priorities for restoration.”

How to do bottom-up restoration?

But what does it mean and how do we make this work for people AND biodiversity?

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Applying the tool: case study in Tanzania

Rainfed agriculture

High yield gaps

High biodiversity

Low food security

High flood risk

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How do we restore trees in such landscapes

We started off with asking ‘where and how can we squeeze in more trees (restoration opportunities)’ ?

Our desired outcomes:

Higher food security

Improved climate change risk mitigation and adaptation

Higher biodiversity

Improved human wellbeing

We collected a lot of data and analysed them: mammals, birds, insects, household wellbeing, nature’s values, soil, microclimate

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Three Co-design Workshops, 2022 & 2023

How to restore and where to restore? Which plant species should be used in the restoration process in which location?
How can we manage and mitigate negative impacts from restoration on people or biodiversity?
How can restoration be financed?
How can we monitor interventions for people and biodiversity outcomes?

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A method framework for rural farmed landscapes as a guide for planning, monitoring & adapting restoration projects.

Governance and adaptive management are included as external drivers and interventions

Changes in landscape configuration, environment and land management predict outcomes for biodiversity and people

3 main outcomes and a set of variables affecting these directly and indirectly

We developed a land systems science model

Guerreiro – Milheiras et al. 2022 Front Forests Global Ch, Pfeifer et al. 2022 Phil Trans Roy Soc B

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And discussed key findings in restoration workshops

More forests -> more mammals

Mammal species richness was highest in the forest habitats, increasing with the percentage of forest cover in a 250 m window around a sampling point, distances to rivers and roads, and tree canopy heterogeneity. Elephant abundance increased with forest cover around each camera trap and decreased with human population density

Poisson regression models

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And discussed key findings in restoration workshops

Open habitats near forests/trees -> more birds

Bird richness overall was very high in the heterogeneous forest – agricultural landscape, declining with increasing forest cover around a survey point and distance to river but also with increasing distance to forest

(same for threatened birds)

Poisson regression models

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And discussed key findings in restoration workshops

The number of invertebrate pests and invertebrate pollinators did not show any other significant relationships with landscape variables.

Wellbeing of farmer households seemed to be largely decoupled from pest induced crop damages, whilst having weak positive correlations with perceived ecosystem services and disservices.

Crop yields and soil carbon stocks showed no responses to increasing canopy closure.

Denser tree canopies buffer from heat stress and benefit leaf productivity

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And discussed key findings in restoration workshops

Restoration of trees will change landscape configuration and by extension all outcomes we are interested in: biodiversity, crop yields/health, conflict, wellbeing

Farmers like trees -> Trees feature in visions that small-holder farmers have for their farms

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And discussed key findings in restoration workshops

Restoration of trees changes landscape configuration -> this will change biodiversity and associated benefits (pest control services, soil fertility) and costs (pest damage, elephant conflict)

How to restore and where to restore? Which plant species should be used in the restoration process in which location?

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Evidence gaps that were identified

How to restore and where to restore using Which species in which locations?

Choice of plant species for restoration?

ecological & socio-economic benefits
and/or ecological costs
Soil and climate: site matching

How to restore riparian zones ?

ecological & socio-economic benefits
Buffer widths and zonation
Flood risk and bank erosion

What does equitable management for wildlife corridors entail?

Effective & feasible conflict mitigation
Planning and incentives

Governance and management constraints & opportunities

Community access for livestock – agroforestry
Crop – Tree interactions: yields, shade, pollinators, pests & soils

limited information on the effectiveness of fences in terms of conflict mitigation in the landscape (likely to depend on type of fence and management) and concerns on the unknown effects of fences on socio-economics of farmer households (given the location of the fence and possible barriers to farmer movements) made it difficult to find consensus on their suitability. It certainly raised questions on their wider use and how biodiversity and social outcomes would need be monitored over time to ensure the use of fences is appropriate and effective.

Concerns were also raised on the lack of communication between restoration and other conservation focussed plans in the context of changes in elephant movements. The entry and exit points of the corridor as currently planned were spatially close to villages as well as a planned Botanic Garden, which needs careful monitoring for unwanted negative effects of elephants spilling over into areas they are not wanted. Additional challenges identified during the workshops related to policy and governance rules regarding riparian buffer zones (RC4

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Evidence gaps that were identified

How to restore and where to restore using Which species in which locations?
How can we manage and mitigate negative impacts?

Mitigating conflict with large herbivores: What will fences look like? How effective are they? How will they impact people and their movements in the valley?

Conflicts are expected to increase after restoration with trees, especially when channelling wildlife through relatively narrow corridors in a heavily farmed landscape.

‘Problem species’ mentioned:

elephants, vervet monkeys, baboons, etc

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Policy needs that may need addressing

Knowledge exchange: facilitate/enforce

Platform: open, accessible, findable data
Transparency (stakeholders involved) and active measures to increase involvement
Soil and climate: site matching

Technical capacity

Demonstration farms
access to information and training opportunities on site: for management, farming, data analyses
Co-design of restoration plan from start to end

Financial support for measures to close the policy implementation gap

Government buy in and long-term planning
Incentives

Governance of NGOs involved in restoration projects

Registration of project with details on spatial locations, objectives, monitoring
Data deposition during project lifetime
Independent auditing: follow above or loose licence

Restoration projects in the landscape are diverse and not necessarily as engaged with realities on the ground for the different stakeholders in the landscape. Our findings emphasize the need for increased data sharing and communication within stakeholder groups and between stakeholders to achieve cross-sectoral consensus, involving industry, which owns large tracts of land, as well as TANAPA managing the protected area estate and conservation focussed NGOs. Institutional barriers partly relate to capacities for actual restoration planning and implementation and for monitoring (data collection and analyses to evaluate efficacy of restoration for biodiversity and social outcomes) and to processes used for knowledge exchange and communication. Additional barriers relate to knowledge and evidence gaps, for example around the interaction of tree restoration with crop outcomes and intersection of tree planting with policies (e.g. riparian buffer zones, land use rights, tree ownership). Also, there is potential bias towards tree planting in restoration practices and planning, which may diverge from the entire concept of restoring ecosystems functions given high heterogeneous nature of the landscape. Thus, recommendations for data sharing (‘All data should be freely available for all stakeholders and if needed be made accessible in different formats and style depending on the stakeholder needs and capacities’ (Table 4, P1 and P2) and building of capacity for understanding data and interpreting them for specific management questions and community needs, with planning that is solutions orientated is crucial. We acknowledge that ethical considerations are important in this context, as sharing of social data or sensitive data (e.g. presence of threatened species) will need to ensure compliance with data protection laws. Most importantly, we emphasize that communities affected by restoration processes need to have equitable access to decision-making, planning, and production and use of data and knowledge. Clear processes need to be generated for feedback of outcomes to communities and other actors with an interest and village meetings have been highlighted as important part of the engagement process.

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Tanzania has shown amazing dedication to restoration

How perceptions of nature's value and wellbeing will respond to changed risks (in space) will require monitoring

Both social and ecological data suggest that tree restoration may be perceived as beneficial – but this requires support in terms of farming advice and evidence (pest control,disease ID, tree : crop selection, tree growing)

Our workshop participants, and specifically the communities, highlighted that they want to see improvements in the restoration process to empower communities, industry and local government to manage and govern (through effective policies) the landscape for its people, their food security, whilst meeting biodiversity and climate change mitigation objectives.

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“A just and effective approach to restoration begins by working with the people who live on and make a living from the land to identify their priorities for restoration.”

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Thinking about costs to people – it matters!

Lauren Barnes, submitted to J Appl Ecol

Changing landscape configuration will alter elephant movements

Lda models predict changes in spatial locations of conflict events

The baseline risk for elephant crop raiding is spatially highly variable in the landscape but can exceed 70% for several smallholder farms.

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Title:

Restoration for biodiversity, wellbeing and climate change mitigation in tropical forest-agricultural landscapes

Abstract:

The science guiding design and evaluation of restoration interventions in tropical landscapes is dominated by ecological processes and outcomes and lacks indicators and methods that integrate human wellbeing into the restoration process. We apply a new systems approach framework for tree restoration in forest-agricultural landscapes to show how this shortcoming can be addressed. Demonstrating ‘proof of concept’, implemented as part of Agrisys Tanzania and Correstor projects, we test statistical models underlying the framework pathways with data collected from a case study in Tanzania. We predictively map how changes in landscape configuration under scenarios of restoration ((e.g. tree restoration along rivers) will alter outcomes for biodiversity, elephant:crop damage, microclimate and wellbeing. We highlight how maps with insights from system pathways and focus group discussions can be used to explore - with stakeholders - restoration opportunities and constraints at local (farm) and landscape scales that consider local knowledge and value systems and multiple outcomes.

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“A just and effective approach to restoration begins by working with the people who live on and make a living from the land to identify their priorities for restoration.”

How to do bottom-up restoration?

Guerreiro – Milheiras et al. 2022 Front Forests Global Ch, Pfeifer et al. 2022 Phil Trans Roy Soc B

This is how John Cannon wrote up our thoughts in an accessible way on Mongabay on 02/11/2022.

A systems approach allows us to link elements within and across the human and natural components and to capture the complexity of interactions between them and the system drivers across scales of space, ecology and organization [19]. Applied to FLR, a systems approach could prove essential to predict synergies and trade-offs in outcomes at the food security–biodiversity–climate change nexus [20], resulting from competing demands on land and resources [21]. FLR can enhance ecosystem services and reverse biodiversity loss, but can also have negative consequences for either, if both are treated in isolation [22]. It can bring benefits to people but also real or perceived costs to their wellbeing, through effects on food security [23,24]. Costs can manifest as disservices such as crop damage from wildlife and through reduced access to land [25]. Disservices may, in turn, affect communities' perceptions on the value of trees or other natural features and thus shape decision-making on land management, thereby reshaping biodiversity and food security outcomes.

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To emphasize: species have complex resource needs

Pfeifer et al. 2017 Creation of forest edges has a global impact on forest vertebrates. Nature 551

Landscape configuration affects the abundance distribution of species. And by extension services and disservices regulated by biodiversity.

Species vary in their responses (some are generalists, some need large core areas of their preferred habitats, some are edge specialists), at least partly regulated by their traits.

Indirect and direct potential drivers: microclimate, resource availability, protection from predators, hunting pressure

Forest core dependent species only

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Plenty of social insights:

Perceptions of natural capital and human wellbeing

Trees feature in visions that small-holder farmers have for their farms

People's perceptions of nature as being of ‘high value’ increased with household wellbeing

Ideal farm: fruit trees, firewood or for timber/construction purposes, multipurpose trees, beekeeping as income-generating activity.

Challenges: High costs. Fires because of sugarcane, Environments for wild animals/ pests. Security issues: theft, Reduce visibility of wild animals and farmers to other farmers. Negative for crops

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Using social and biodiversity sciences to co-design restoration for biodiversity and people in the Kilombero Valley, Tanzania

Marion Pfeifer,

TAWIRI conference, 12/2023

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Data collection teams sent out 2019 – 2021

Ecological data collection:

Microclimate sensor stations

Camera traps

Bird surveys

Vegetation, soil & insect plots

Crop damage (elephants)

Social data collection:

Inception meetings

Household surveys

Interviews

Farmer focus groups

Government focus groups

Knowledge exchange events

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Using a systems approach as a tool

Changes in landscape configuration, environment and land management predict outcomes for biodiversity

Schneider-Maunory et al. 2017 Biol Conserv, Pfeifer et al. 2017 Creation of forest edges has a global impact on forest vertebrates. Nature; Wearns et al. 2019 J Animal Ecol; Betts et al 2019 Science; Watling et al. 2020 Ecol Lett

And for microclimate

Hardwick et al. 2015 Forest Agric Meteor; Pfeifer et al. 2019 PeerJ

And for human – crop - wildlife interactions

Lauren Barnes (Elephants, MBiol), Becca Sargent (Lions, PhD)