Assessing ecosystem service provision from local to landscape scale to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability in Papua New Guinea

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Je-S Paragraph - complete the section below if your project has to be registered with the NERC Research Council One of society's greatest global challenges is to achieve food security in the face of an expanding global population and climate change. Such pressures are particularly relevant to Papua New Guinea (PNG), which has the third largest area of tropical forest worldwide, and where 85% of the population depend on small-scale, subsistence agriculture. PNG farmers need solutions that will increase agricultural productivity and resilience, without detrimentally affecting the natural forest. One solution for tackling this issue is to harness ecosystem services across the agricultural landscape. This approach would involve: (1) Quantifying ecosystem services across the agricultural landscape; (2) Investigating how these ecosystem services could be enhanced to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability; and (3) Investigating spatial and temporal connections (ecosystem flows) between ecosystem service provision and benefiting areas, at the landscape scale; and thus, (4) Optimising land management. This project will enable the student to accomplish original science in a tropical ecosystem, alongside delivering feasible solutions to a challenge faced by many tropical countries.