Advances in Crop Science and Technology
Open Access

Review on species selection in Agroforestry of the Asia-Pacific Region: opportunities and challenges

Copyright: © 2020  . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Agroforestry systems play a vital role in sustainable forest management as they balance livelihood improvement and forest conservation, particularly in the Asia-Pacific Region, where poverty, intensive lands use, deforestation, and forest degradation are common. Species selection is an essential key factor in agroforestry establishment. Here, we explored agroforestry patterns with their intrinsic connections affecting the Asia-Pacific Region economy. We reviewed the literatures across 12 Asia-Pacific Region economies and determined that a total of 108 species belonging to 95 genus and 49 families formed this region agroforestry engine, and conducted Rule and Maptree analyses to unravel the various employed agroforestry patterns. Our results show: 1) on the species-family level, species selection significantly differed among economies, while the most common family-species combination were identified for each economy; 2) on the species-genera level, the studied economies, according to their most common used species, can be divided into three similar groups: a) Thailand, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and Fiji with Hevea, Oryza, Eucalyptus, Acacia, and Zea; b) Nepal and China (Yunnan) with Zea, Leucaena, Morus, and Hevea; and c) Indonesia and the Philippines with Oryza, Hevea, Zea, and Brassica. In conclusion, the observed different agroforestry patterns among the studied economies indicated the need for a significant information sharing within the region. The Agroforestry systems need to be extend to Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Lao PDR. We conclude that the most common species combination should be widely adopted within each economy, while lessons learnt from existing genera-level agroforestry models should be duplicated and tested within each similar economy group. Although, this study focused on high-level taxonomy classification (family and genera), the results would shed light on the opportunities and challenges for future cooperation in agroforestry.

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