Nicaragua–Honduras sentinel landscape

Initial listing of villages with census data, regional censuses (scarce, not up to date)
National maps, regional maps
Visits to municipalities, knowledge of partners
Check location of villages within or near the block

2014
Baseline field studies and production of clean databases have been completed.

Researchers will coorganize a national symposium-workshop on linking science to rural development and education, as part of the Government of Nicaragua’s Science Week. Current research on the Nicaragua-Honduras sentinel landscape will be presented for the first time. The symposium-workshop is jointly designed, sponsored and implemented by FTA, CATIE, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), CIRAD, La Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica (CONICYT), Fundación para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Agropecuario y Forestal de Nicaragua (FUNICA), the National Council of Universities (CNU), ICRAF, and MAPNoruega. Others are expected to join the group of sponsors.

Information on trees on farms collected in the household baseline survey has been analyzed and presented in a comprehensive technical report, and a short manuscript to submit to a peer-reviewed journal once the quality of the manuscript is improved.

Dr Geovana Carreño, as part of a two-year post-doctoral position, will work on the inventory of trees and forest patches in farms in the four study blocks. An exchange student has been gathering technical information on cameras, remote sensors and unmanned flying vehicles to provide cartographic information in real time to lead the sampling of the trees on the farms.Another exchange student has been working on making CATIE’s agroforestry databases open access using the Dataverse platform. Some databases are already available on Dataverse.

The goal is to incorporate in Dataverse all the survey and experimental data on agroforestry with cocoa and coffee collected by Eduardo Somarriba. Once this is completed, we will conduct similar exercises with researchers with organized data, and eventually examine the databases produced by the MSc research. In the meantime, it has been recommended to CATIE’s graduate school that all MSc students submit their databases to Dataverse as part of their graduation process.

Various CGIAR centers and research programs are operating in various sections of the Nicaragua-Honduras sentinel landscape. An alliance between CIAT-CATIE-CIRAD has initiated a process to put everybody in contact and keep them well informed. Various project proposals, in alliance with colleagues from Bioversity International, CIRAD, CATIE and others, have been developed. More integration between ICRAF and MAPNoruega is taking place.

Researchers designed four Masters-level research projects involving fieldwork in the first half of 2015. All studies will focus on issues along the forest transition curve, tree botanical and functional diversity, livelihoods, etc.

As a part of the activities to support to others landscape teams, the Nicaragua-Honduras sentinel landscape field coordinator Norvin Sepúlveda travelled to Peru in order to share the methodology, but also experiences with and lessons learned from potential problems, and alternatives to solve them.

An agreement to start the biophysical baseline with training on the LDSF has been reached. LDSF training will be conducted by Sepúlveda (CATIE) and Noel Ulloa (CATIE), involving around 20 people from the organizations of three countries.