The Cornell Ecoagriculture Working Group (EWG) in concert with Ecoagriculture Partners, an international nongovernmental organization, and a steering committee of 20 science, conservation, and rural development organizations has created the Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC) with support from four donors. The online platform is enabling agricultural producers and technical service providers from diverse sectors and disciplines around the world to share ideas and information about how to use measurement for managing natural resources to improve profitability and livelihood security for farmers while safeguarding biodiversity and ecosystem services at landscape scale.

Globally, agriculture dominates land and water use like no other human enterprise, with landscapes providing products that are essential to human sustenance. Yet because of their predominance, agricultural landscapes must also support wild species biodiversity and ecosystem services. Moreover, global demand for associated agricultural products is projected to rise by at least 50 percent over the next two decades. These conflicting trends are prompting farmers and policy makers alike to identify innovative ways of reconciling agricultural production and production-dependent rural livelihoods with healthy ecosystems. Unfortunately, the dominant national and global institutions for policy, business, conservation, agriculture, and research have been shaped largely by "mental models" that assume, and even require, segregated approaches.
A new paradigm, ecoagriculture, is emerging to scale up the innovation required to redefine and reorganize the relationship between production agriculture and conservation of biodiversity. Defined as integrated conservation-agriculture landscapes where biodiversity conservation is an explicit objective of agriculture and rural development, and where agriculture and rural development are explicitly considered in shaping conservation strategies, ecoagriculture is proving to be a compelling integrative concept. While diverse and conventionally competing organizations are seeking ways to transform the concept into practice, tangible methods for fostering innovations in cooperation and integration are in short supply.

The Cornell Ecoagriculture Working Group has cooperated with Ecoagriculture Partners and an international steering committee of some 20 diverse organizations to create a web-based platform designed to foster learning and understanding that will lead to improved knowledge and understanding of the performance of ecoagriculture landscapes. The Landscape Measures Resource Center (LMRC) and the LMRC Forum comprise a system that supports distributed learning about ways to measure and track change over time in the performance of ecoagriculture landscapes. The LMRC is designed to foster communication and understanding between residents in landscapes where ecoagriculture-type goals are being pursued and external experts who can aid in managing and measuring the performance of the landscape. It is designed also to capture experience-based knowledge that will advance the practice of ecoagriculture through features of the site that encourage contributions by users. The conceptual foundation for the LMRC is detailed in Ecoagriculture Partners Discussion Paper #2, Understanding Ecoagriculture.

Donors who have funded the development of the LMRC (PROFOR, Global Environmental Facility, the Nature Conservancy, Terre Africa, and the Dutch government) are organizing events to launch it within their networks, and catalyzing workshops where characteristic users will gain experience with the content and the platform. In the meantime, Ecoagriculture Partners is testing its use in "learning landscapes" in eastern Africa, and is preparing to test it in ecoagriculture landscapes in meso-America. Members of the landscape measures steering committee are preparing to use the LMRC in their respective programs. As the LMRC comes into widespread, coordinated use and it is adapted for diverse local conditions, the sectoral and disciplinary divides that negatively affect landscapes where interests in conservation and production converge will likely diminish. This will lead to enhanced valuation of the assets that farmers depend on for their livelihoods and that global society depends on to conserve biodiversity and other ecosystem services.

Ecoagriculture Partners, Inc.