Cash Crop Integration for Sustainable Incomes

The cash crop integration component aimed to incentivize tree management by linking reforestation efforts with short-term income generation. Top-performing farmers, assessed based on tree survival rates and GAP training participation, were awarded cash crop inputs such as soya beans and groundnuts. These crops were selected for their adaptability to local soils, market demand, and ability to complement agroforestry systems. Farmers achieved an average 12% increase in soya bean yields (350 kg/acre) and 10% increase in groundnut yields (240 kg/acre), with incomes averaging UGX 1,050,000 ($285) for soya beans and UGX 900,000 ($244) for groundnuts. The inclusion of cash crops encouraged farmers to maintain their agroforestry systems, reducing tree felling for short-term needs.

  • Crop Suitability: Identifying crops that thrive in local conditions while supporting agroforestry practices.
  • Farmer Training: GAP for cash crops, focusing on planting density, pest management, and post-harvest handling to improve yields.
  • Market Access: Establishing links with traders and milling companies to secure 15% higher prices and reduce reliance on middlemen.
  • Monitoring and Evaluation:  Digital monitoring and evaluation, regular farm visits to assess crop performance and address challenges promptly.
  • Crop integration incentivized tree preservation and diversified farmer incomes, enhancing resilience to climate shocks.
  • Regional variation in weather and soil conditions impacted yields. Research and consultancy would help identify the most suitable varieties.
  • Poor post-harvest handling in some areas reduced profits. Training on crop drying and storage is essential to maximize market value.
  • Develop region-specific crop calendars and include low-cost storage solutions to address post-harvest losses. Partnering with buyers early ensures market demand aligns with farmer production.
Tree Planting at community Level

The primary purpose of tree planting at community level is to achieve large-scale ecosystem restoration while enhancing local livelihoods through agroforestry. The project partnered with four communities to mobilize 425 farmers for tree planting, distributing 73,867 seedlings. Farmers were trained in Good Agroforestry Practices (GAP), including tree planting techniques, mulching, pest and disease management, and soil fertility enhancement. Tree species like Grevillea robusta and Agrocarpus were selected for their fast growth, timber production potential, and ability to improve microclimates and soil structure. Tree planting activities focused on degraded lands prone to erosion and drought, effectively addressing flood control, biodiversity restoration, and ecosystem loss.

  • Farmer Training: Comprehensive GAP training to equip farmers with technical skills in tree care, pruning, and pest management.
  • Species Suitability: Selecting trees adapted to regional environmental conditions to maximize survival and growth rates including soils, weather, culture and .
  • Monitoring Systems: Continuous farmer field visits to monitor growth, survival rates, and emerging challenges.
  • Community Ownership: Collaborating with SEs and local leaders ensured trust, commitment, and adoption of sustainable tree management practices.
  • Integration of trees with cash crops enhances farmer engagement and ensures long-term care for planted trees.
  • Survival rates were highest in areas with reliable rainfall (Kapchorwa at 92%), highlighting the need for location-specific strategies in drought-prone regions.
  • Termite infestations in Busia and Mbale posed a challenge, requiring targeted pest control solutions such as biological control agents and mulching to minimize damage.
     

    Advice: Deploy tree care manuals with localized pest and soil management techniques. Integrate weather forecast systems to align planting activities with optimal rainfall periods and mitigate drought-related losses.

Community-Based Nursery Beds

The purpose of community-based permanent nursery beds is to ensure the production of high-quality, resilient seedlings for reforestation efforts while building local capacity. Each of the four project districts (Luwero, Mbale, Busia, and Kapchorwa) established one centralized nursery bed per location, equipped with essential tools, irrigation facilities, and trained nursery operators. Seeds were delivered early (December 2023–January 2024) to allow for the full growth and hardening process, ensuring seedlings met survival standards. The nurseries produced 96,423 seedlings of multi-purpose tree species, including Grevillea and Agrocarpus, which were selected for their adaptability to local climatic conditions, drought resistance, and soil stabilization properties. Nurseries also served as training hubs, where farmers learned good agroforestry techniques, seed propagation, pest control, and seedling management techniques.

  • Technical Knowledge: Trained operators with skills in seed management, seedling management, farmer training, community mobilisation and engagement, root pruning, and hardening-off processes.
  • Access to Inputs: Reliable supply of quality seeds, potting materials, and pest control inputs.
  • Water Availability: Sustainable irrigation systems to overcome drought periods and maintain seedling health.
  • Community Engagement: Active participation from farmers and local leaders to monitor and support nursery operations.
  • Early seed delivery, proper management, good nursery management and seedling hardening significantly improved tree survival rates in harsh field conditions.
  • Poor irrigation infrastructure in some locations exposed seedlings to water stress during dry spells. Investment in simple irrigation techniques is recommended to mitigate this.
  • Root damage and poor seedling management during transplanting led to seedling mortality in some cases. Ensuring proper root ball integrity during handling is critical.
     

    Advice: Establish contingency production targets (10–15% above the actual requirement) to buffer losses from pests or weather-related issues. Additionally, develop on-site water harvesting systems to support irrigation during drought periods.

Data Sources

The system combines data from drones, satellites, camera traps, and geospatial tools to create a comprehensive monitoring framework. This approach can be adapted for other environmental challenges, such as flood monitoring, by integrating relevant data sources specific to those contexts.

  • Reliable access to real-time data from sensors, satellites, drones, and cameras is critical.
  • High-quality sensors and data processing systems must be available to collect and analyze diverse data types.
  • Systems must use compatible formats to integrate data seamlessly.
  • Interconnectivity & interoperability of systems is crucial. 
  • The platform must be software and hardware agnostic.
  • Cybersecurity and intercommunication are crucial.
Education tools

Amphibians are more threatened and are declining more rapidly than either birds or mammals. Amphibian populations are decreasing due to multiple factors, such as climate change, the chytrid fungus, and other anthropogenic factors such as species trafficking. However, the level of threat to amphibians is undoubtedly underestimated because 1294 species (22.5%) are too poorly known to assess, as compared with only 78 birds (0.8%) (Stuart et al., 2004). 

This knowledge deficit underscores the vital importance of educational tools like Ribbit in democratizing scientific research. By lowering barriers to ecological monitoring, apps like Ribbit transform passive observers into active conservation participants. Educational technologies enable citizen scientists to directly contribute to understanding and protecting vulnerable ecosystems, addressing critical research limitations through expanded data collection in under-researched regions.

These innovative platforms increase public awareness about biodiversity challenges while providing accessible pathways for scientific engagement. Unlike bird-focused apps with well-established research infrastructures, anuran conservation has lacked comprehensive citizen science platforms. Ribbit fills this critical gap by empowering individuals to become crucial contributors to amphibian research, turning the tide on data deficiency and supporting global conservation efforts through collaborative, technology-enabled environmental stewardship.

  • Subject matter expertise: one of our team members (Juliana Gómez Consuegra) worked closely with other experts who were researching the chytrid fungus. 
  • Creating accessible web app: intuitive design of web app allows less-experienced observers to participate and learn.

While the goal is to educate nature enthusiasts, we want to avoid the increase of species trafficking. For this reason, we decided not to allow users to have access to each other's data. That way, an endangered species' location won't be visible to traffickers, on the app. Users only have access to their own data. Once data is shared with GBIF, the data is obscured, so that neither the frog's nor the user's precise location will be disclosed to the general public. 

Citizen science and community engagement

Citizen science apps have been shown to aid in biodiversity monitoring while engaging nature enthusiasts (Callaghan et al., 2019). For instance,  FrogID, an app by the Australian Museum, allows users to record frog calls whose identity is verified by human validators. To date, FrogID has published papers related to monitoring invasive species (Rowley and Callaghan, 2023), informing IUCN red list assessments (Gallagher et al., 2024), assessing fire impacts (Mitchell et. al., 2023), understanding urbanization impacts (Callaghan et al., 2020) and studying frog call behavior (Liu et al., 2022). Our goal is to achieve similar results with Ribbit, with anuran species around the world, and in a shorter time frame. To date, the FrogID team has a backlog of over 18,000 calls, which could be greatly reduced with our app, since the processing time is greatly reduced with the implementation of machine learning algorithms. 

During the first round of beta testing of our app, 50 users submitted recordings for identification. Their feedback has been positive: subject matter experts have pointed out that the species they recorded matched the one predicted by Ribbit, and nature enthusiasts have enjoyed the "Frog of the Day" feature introducing them to a new anuran species or allowing them to re-acquaint with familiar anurans through name and most common vocalization of the species. 

  • Ease of use: through analyzed feedback from users, we iterated to enhance user experience and accessibility.
  • Familiarity of established citizen ecological science apps: with FrogID, Merlin, eBird and iNaturalist used as references, we mimicked key app features for quick initiation for new users.
  • It is hard to strike a balance between different types of users. While scientists advocated for using scientific names, nature enthusiasts did not connect to these names and preferred common names. However, obtaining common names for all our species in all four languages proved to be challenging. This is another opportunity for development: crowdsourcing common names around the world. 
Vulnerability Map

It is the analysis that produces a map with the gradient of vulnerability to the potential impacts of mining tailings dam collapses for environmental risk management. It is the product of cross-referencing information on the impact of potential environmental degradation resulting from the collapse of mining dams and the sensitivity of biodiversity.

  • Sharing of geospatial information with regulatory agencies in the mineral sector;
  • Access to specialist knowledge through collaboration with the National Centers for Research and Conservation of Fauna (ICMBio) and Flora (CNC-Flora/JBR) to identify conservation targets

The effort was necessary to meet a demand for information on environmental vulnerability perceived by the Institute itself in light of the catastrophic events that have occurred in Brazil in recent years with the collapse of mining dams.

Map for environmental compensation

Process that defines the most suitable areas for offsetting environmental impacts based on analyses of the similarity of the composition of biodiversity and geodiversity sensitive to mining. This map assumes that the best place to invest efforts to offset the impacts of a mining activity will be those that share the largest number of conservation targets affected by the project. To this end, a spatially explicit hierarchical cluster analysis was performed, with the aid of the vegan and sf packages of the R statistical program, which indicates a gradient of similarity between impacted and protected areas, grouped into groups and clusters for offsetting.

  • Access to specialist knowledge through collaboration with the National Centers for Research and Conservation of Fauna (ICMBio) and Flora (CNC-Flora/JBR) to identify conservation targets.
  • Knowledge accumulated in the management of federal conservation units, especially in the application of environmental compensation resources.
  • Brazilian legal framework that provides for the allocation of financial resources from projects that promote significant environmental impacts, such as mining, to strengthen the system of conservation units for environmental compensation purposes (Law No. 9,985, of July 18, 2000, which institutes the National System of Nature Conservation Units).

The analyses showed potential for refining the criteria currently established by Brazilian legislation for compensating environmental impacts

Compatibility map

This is a stage in the integration of information to generate a map that indicates the different levels of compatibility between the conservation of biodiversity and speleological heritage and mining, in search of solutions that help to avoid, mitigate and compensate for environmental impacts. This product is obtained by overlaying the Exposure to Impacts with the map of Sensitive Areas of Biodiversity and Speleological Heritage, which makes it possible to understand the gradient of compatibility between biodiversity conservation and mining, by pointing out: (i) which areas should be avoided and which should be prioritized for investments in mineral exploration; (ii) the environmental cost associated with each locational choice; and (iii) the type of mitigating measures to be adopted with greater intensity in each location. The method used to develop the tool can be easily replicated for other locations and even other threat vectors. 

  • Well-established theoretical and methodological bases that technically support the tool.
  • Spatial information generated that can be explored by different GIS tools and inserted into Web Map Service (WMS) environments, which facilitate application by the user.

Identification of how the environmental layer has been weakly included in the planning of economic activities and mainly that there is a demand for more precise information on environmental costs in activity planning.

Integrating zoological gardens and animals under human care into a science- and technology-driven research and conservation project

Modern Zoological gardens and aquariums worldwide provide unique opportunities by contributing expertise in animal care, species conservation, and public education, forming a strong foundation for modern conservation and scientific research. By working closely with these institutions and utilizing the data and insights they generate, the GAIA Initiative aims at bridging the gap between in-situ and ex-situ conservation efforts. Animals under human care can serve as valuable models for understanding species’ biology, behaviour, and responses to environmental changes. Furthermore, the controlled conditions of zoological gardens allow for the development and testing of advanced technologies, such as animal-borne sensors and AI systems, under more predictable and accessible settings before deployment in the wild.

Key focus areas of this building block include:

  • Generating reference and training data for the development of the AI pipeline for the sensor data. By deploying the tags on vultures in captivity in a large aviary and recoding their behaviour simultaneously, we were able to create a paired dataset for the training of the AI.  With the trained AI there is no more need to observe the animals to detect relevant behaviour, e.g. feeding; the AI can very reliably predict behaviour from the sensor data giving us insights in the behaviour of the target animals throughout their life.
  • Education and public engagement: Zoo Berlin integrates GAIA’s findings into its educational programs and collaborates in media relations and public outreach, fostering public awareness and participation in biodiversity conservation and technological innovations. Visitors are introduced to cutting-edge tools and their impact on wildlife conservation.