One of humanity's greatest contemporary challenges is producing enough food to sustain human populations in developing regions while preserving naturally-functioning habitats that provide key ecosystem services such as clean drinking water, biodiversity, carbon storage, and climate moderation. This PIRE project leverages substantial existing investments in Africa by the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) to mount an international and interdisciplinary study of this great challenge. One of the goals of the MVP is to increase food security by providing local populations in 14 Millennium Villages (MVs) with agricultural interventions such as mineral fertilizers and high-yield seeds. This PIRE project builds upon the MVP's rigorous ongoing evaluation of responses to this agricultural intensification and adds a new dimension of analysis by examining the impacts of the agricultural intensification on land use decisions, human well-being, and ecosystem services at the local and landscape levels.
This project focuses on two MVs, in Sauri, Kenya and Mbola, Tanzania. It also incorporates the wealth of data, including survey and field measurements and analyses of remotely sensed imagery, from all 14 MVs across Africa. There are three main experimental components of this project. First, the PIRE team will examine how agricultural intensification acts within communities using indicators such as land-use change, human well-being, ecosystem function, and biodiversity. Second, they will analyze the larger MVP dataset to examine how population density, degree of landscape modification, and climate influence responses to agricultural intensification. Third, for a subset of MVs and nearby non-MV "control" villages, the team will take measurements of ecosystem function and analyze the impacts of agricultural intensification over time.
Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from the U.S. and African universities will study both the social and biological consequences of the MVP agricultural interventions. The interdisciplinary expertise of the PIRE team will enable the team to, for example, combine social survey data with satellite remote sensing data to test whether agriculture intensification within MVs actually "saves land for nature" by changing behaviors such that outside the villages there is reduced agricultural activity and reduced conversion of natural areas to agriculture.
The project aims to create a multi-institutional, multinational, and interdisciplinary educational environment for students and faculty from three U.S. institutions and two African institutions. Cross-cultural mentoring and collaboration is a focus for participants at all levels, benefitting U.S. and African students and faculty. Approximately 50 U.S. undergraduate and Masters students will receive scientific training through core courses, field courses, workshops, and internships. U.S. Ph.D. students will be supported for MVP-focused research theses projects and receive language training in Swahili before spending substantial time in East Africa collaborating with African partners. Project faculty will develop a new interdisciplinary and international course on the "Natural and Social Dynamics of Land-Use Change" using data from Africa and engaging African faculty and students. The project will provide U.S. students with international and interdisciplinary research training in the context of sustaining food production and ecosystem services in developing countries. By examining the impact of MV interventions on people and the environment, the project will provide information that could guide future policies for enhancing human wellbeing, food security, and environmental conservation in one of the world's most impoverished regions.
This PIRE project will draw upon the individual strengths of the U.S. and African universities and combine them with several existing African research networks to form research and education networks ideally positioned to conduct this interdisciplinary research. The U.S. institutions will also benefit because the project will give both senior and junior faculty invaluable international experience in designing and conducting a large multinational research project, in training students via international collaboration, and in managing the logistics of a complex project in Africa. The PIRE project will also improve access to international research experiences for U.S. students from groups underrepresented in science via collaborations with the Leadership Alliance (RI), Dillard University (LA), and the Ecological Society of America's Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability (SEEDS) program.
This PIRE is a partnership among Brown University (RI), The Earth Institute of Columbia University (NY), The Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MA) and foreign partners at the Moi University (Kenya) and Sokoine University (Tanzania).
This project is supported by the NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering, the Division of Environmental Biology, and NSF's EPSCoR Program.
