Defining, managing and coping with weather and climate related risks in agroforestry

Abstract

The areas where trees and crops modify each other's biophysical environment can be thought of as the tree/crop interface. It is there that they compete for growth resources such as light, water and nutrients, three resource pools exploited by the components of agroforestry systems (Huxley 1983). Generally the interactions are complex, either positive or negative, and they result in services rendered and/or competitive effects (Stigter and Baldy 1993). In order to optimize the interactions in tree/crop combinations, it is necessary to understand, and therefore to define and quantify, changes in radiation regime, wind field and rainfall partitioning due to the trees as obstacles in agricultural crop land and interception by canopy and stem of the trees. Darnhofer et al. (1989) quantified the latter changes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.