The Ecological Assessment Initiative (EAI)
Understanding the long term biodiverstity and socioeconomic impacts of agricultural land use change on nature and humans

Land use changes in the Atlantic Forest
Brazilian Atlantic Forest is shrinking at an alarming rate due to anthropogenic activities, such as agriculture. This forest loss has tremendous impacts on the conservation of unique Atlantic Forest biodiversity, and on the livelihoods of local people.
Southern Bahia is an example of the impacts of deforestation on nature and people. In this region, cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) is an iconic crop historically cultivated in traditionally cabrucas systems under the shade of Atlantic Forest remnant and planted multi-purpose trees. This type of systems, known as agroforests, play an essential role in sustainable development by balancing food production with biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem stability.
However, environmental, and socioeconomic pressures in Southern Bahia push producers to convert their cabrucas into intensified systems to increase short-term profits, but with long-term socio-environmental consequences as landscape simplification, and biodiversity loss creates poor ecosystem resilience to mitigate climate change impacts.
Drivers of land use change
The Ecological Assessment (EAI) is a multi-disciplinary and multi-stakeholder research project initiated by SASE Lab that aims to quantify the long-term biodiversity impacts and the socioeconomic drivers of agricultural land use change in the Atlantic Forest region of southern Bahía, Brazil.
We use cutting edge technologies, such as AI-based cameras to quantify biodiversity changes across six main land use systems following an intensification gradient in Southern Bahia; namely (i) pastures, (ii) cocoa monocultures, (iii) planted-tree shade cocoa agroforests, (iv) forest-tree shade cocoa agroforests, (v) young forests, (vi) old forests. We then, combine this data with socioeconomic parameters to identify the main drivers of land use changes, and their consequences on nature and people’s livelihoods.
Our results provide directions for recommendations on best agroecological practices for sustainable cocoa production, biodiversity conservation, and ultimately to improve people’s wellbeing.


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