Dr Hemant Tripathi | When landscapes change, do we gain, do we lose? Biodiversity insights Zambia

Описание: As agriculture expands across Sub-Saharan Africa, can we feed growing populations without losing the natural services vital to farming?

Dr Hemant Tripathi, Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds (chaired by Prof Stephen Whitfield, Professor of Climate, Agriculture and Food, University of Leeds and followed by 10 minutes for Q&A) presented findings from Zambia's Chibombo district, where he examined how landscape transformation affects the invertebrates that underpin agricultural productivity, crop pests, their natural predators, pollinators, and decomposers.

The results reveal a "mosaic buffer effect": heterogeneous landscapes maintain ecosystem services far better than direct forest-to-cropland conversion. Dr Tripathi shares practical insights on why intensification without landscape planning may ultimately backfire, and how spatial complexity is essential for farming system resilience.

"Direct forest-to-cropland conversion creates severe, irreversible losses in natural pest control—but there's a middle ground." This research is part of the FoSTA-Health project, a UKRI GCRF-funded collaboration between the University of Leeds, Wageningen University and the University of Zambia examining food system transformation across southern Africa.

Dr Tripathi is a PostDoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on the EU-funded FoSTA-Health project. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher on the GCRF-funded AFRICAP project. His research examines biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical agricultural systems, with a focus on how landscape transformation affects invertebrate communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences.

Hemant's staff profile: https://biologicalsciences.leeds.ac.u...