Agroforestry Systems 46: 161180, 1999.

1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

A general classification of agroforestry practice

FERGUS L. SINCLAIR
School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2UW,
UK; E-mail: f.l.sinclair@bangor.ac.uk

Key words: definition, description, ecology, landscape analysis, systems analysis

Abstract. Present classification schemes confuse agroforestry practices, where trees are
intimately associated with agricultural components at a field scale, with the whole farm and
forest systems of which they form a part. In fact, it is common for farming systems to involve
the integration of several reasonably discrete agroforestry practices, on different types of land.
The purpose of a general classification is to identify different types of agroforestry and to group
those that are similar, thereby facilitating communication and the organized storage of information. A new scheme is proposed that uses the practice rather than the system as the unit
of classification. This allows an efficient grouping of practices that have a similar underlying
ecology and prospects for management. A two stage definition of agroforestry is proposed that
distinguishes an interdisciplinary approach to land use from a set of integrated land use
practices. Four levels of organization are recognized through analysis of the role of trees in
agricultural landscapes: the land use system, categories of land use within systems, discrete
groups of components (trees, crops, animals) managed together, and functionally connected
groups of such discrete practices in time and space. Precedents for this form of analysis are
found in the literature and it conforms with generally accepted methods of systems analysis.
Classification of major types of agroforestry practice proceeds primarily according to the components involved and the predominant usage of land. A secondary scheme further classifies these
in terms of the arrangement, density and diversity of the tree components involved.

Introduction
The primary purpose of a general classification of agroforestry is to identify
the different types of agroforestry that occur and to group those that are
similar, thereby facilitating communication and the organized storage of
information about them. While different classifications may be suitable for
different purposes, it is useful to have a generally accepted way of classifying and describing the major types that occur frequently to be able to communicate without having to perpetually clarify definitions.
The classification scheme predominantly used in agroforestry since the mid
1980s, based on an inventory of agroforestry systems in developing countries (Nair, 1987, 1989a), has remained essentially unchanged over the last
decade (Nair, 1985, 1987, 1989b, 1990 and 1993) despite major shifts in how
agroforestry is perceived both as a development imperative in temperate and
tropical regions and as an area of scientific enquiry (Gordon et al., 1997;
Leakey, 1996; Sanchez, 1995).
The terminology and concepts used in Nairs classification are problem-

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atic because they are not consistent with general system theory (von
Bertalanfy, 1950) and its long history of application in agriculture and ecology
(Jeffers, 1978; Jones and Street, 1990; Spedding, 1976) and conflict with
predominant views of how farming systems are locally organized and managed
(Rocheleau, 1987; Simmonds, 1985). The most acute problem is in the
inappropriate use of the word system itself, which not only conflicts with the
central concept of holism in general system theory but, as Nair (1989c) himself
points out, also conflicts with the concept of generalising land use systems
or farming systems, at the level of the household or human decisionmaking unit, used in ICRAFs diagnosis and design procedures for agroforestry development (Raintree, 1983, 1990) and the farming systems literature
more generally (Hilderbrand, 1990).
The confusion arises because agroforestry, as it is practiced, is very rarely
a whole farm or forest system. It is much more common for trees to be used
in various productive niches within a farm, which is increasingly how agroforestry is being viewed and defined (Gordon et al., 1997; Leakey, 1996).
Each instance of tree use on a farm, or of agricultural integration in forests,
is for a purpose or set of purposes, and has characteristic components and
management. This makes it more useful, from an agroforestry perspective, to
classify and describe such practices, considering their role within the systems
of which they form a part, rather than to attempt to classify the whole farm
or forest systems that they are in. Indeed, a number of well-founded global
classifications of farming systems predate the relatively recent interest in
agroforestry (Duckham and Masefield, 1970; Grigg, 1974; Ruthenberg, 1980;
Spedding, 1979) and rules have been developed for defining systems locally
for the purpose of research and development (Simmonds, 1985). The rise in
the prominence of agroforestry as a subject focus demands that the role of
trees within these systems is understood but does not require a fundamentally different approach to viewing the systems themselves because agroforestry is most often only a component of them.
The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to present a general scheme for
classifying agroforestry practice that combines the salient features of Nairs
(1985) approach, primarily considering the components involved and their
arrangement, and so appropriate at the level of the practice, with an understanding of the role of trees in farming and forest systems compatible with
mainstream systems thinking. The concept of grouping practices in time and
space is introduced to deal with distinct successional phases in long rotations, and the fact that individual farm systems may comprise types of land
that have fundamentally different land use potential is made explicit. This
allows an efficient grouping of agroforestry practices that have similar underlying ecology and prospects for management, useful for identification of the
different types of agroforestry that are practiced, and as a basis for communication and organized storage of information about them.

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Materials and methods
The classification scheme presented here has been developed and tested over
a number of years. The process of development involved three stages: (i) evaluation of data collected in ICRAFs Agroforestry Systems Inventory (AFSI)
project (Nair, 1987); (ii) design and implementation of a new global database
of agroforestry practices based on the AFSI data; and (iii) field testing of the
new design by enumerating agroforestry practices occurring in temperate
countries and at national and regional levels in the tropics.
Evaluation of ICRAFs agroforestry systems inventory
The AFSI database, and the original inventory sheets upon which it was based,
were transferred from ICRAF to Bangor in 1990 and evaluated in terms of
generally accepted methods of systems analysis (Sinclair et al., 1991). The
database contained 128 system descriptions from a range of tropical countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America (Nair, 1987). There was a lot of
supporting information about the majority of systems that had been inventoried, except for 60 systems from Latin America for which no secondary
information was available. These data had been contributed from various parts
of the world by different regional coordinators who had interpreted data
collection protocols differently (Nair, 1989c).
There was a great deal of variability in the completeness of AFSI database
entries. Of the 76 fields available for each system in the main database file
(there were separate data files on species and their uses), over the whole
database only about half contained any data (ranging from 28% in the least
fully described to 97% in the most complete) and some fields were used more
consistently than others (for example, while over 97% of the systems had
information on outputs, only 80% had information on agroforestry practices
and only 21% information on soil drainage).
There was also variability in the interpretation of terminology and concepts
amongst different system entries, often related to the regions from which
they were contributed. This was not surprising given the pioneering role of
the AFSI project in an emerging subject area and its wide geographical and
institutional spread. Ambiguity in the meaning of the fundamental unit of the
inventory the system itself had resulted in vastly different numbers of
records from different locations depending on the local interpretation of what
constituted a system. In some cases system appeared to have been taken to
refer to a collection of different discrete agroforestry practices on a single
land management unit (e.g. live fences, trees in fields, fodder banks), in others,
as it appears was intended (Nair, 1989c), the widespread use of a single
practice over a wide area.

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Re-implementation
Consideration of the need for consistent interpretation of data across the wide
range of system descriptions, led to a re-implementation of the database
(Sinclair et al., 1991) that distinguished between agroforestry practices
discrete groups of agricultural and forestry components (crops, animals, trees)
managed together for a particular purpose on the same land and interacting
in space and/or time and the larger land use systems in which they were
found groups of farms, forests or other land use management units considered sufficiently similar to one another to constitute a generalized pattern of
land management in an area. The fundamental unit of the database, therefore, became the practice, and information about the system it was in, part of
the contextual information stored about each practice.
The new database design was implemented in dBASE IV as a set of controlling files, look up tables and a user interface (Sinclair et al., 1991). The
set of seven controlling files contained a common set of key fields enabling
relational database retrieval at system and practice level with the individual
files storing general data about the agroforestry practices, land use categories
and farming systems and for each practice the types of components involved
(trees, crops and animals), the species used and their vertical and horizontal
arrangement.
Field testing
The scheme for classification and description of agroforestry employed in
the new implementation, and as described below, was used to enumerate
systems documented in the original AFSI inventory and then further tested
and refined by enumerating temperate systems and using the scheme with
international student groups studying agroforestry at the University of Wales,
Bangor between 1991 and 1995 (this involved over a hundred students from
more than thirty countries). The process of enumeration involved breaking
written system descriptions down into their constituent units. Firstly, categories of land use within each system were identified and then the agroforestry
practices occurring on each type of land. Any functional relationships in space
or time amongst practices were then identified followed by the components
within each practice. Components were then fully enumerated in terms of their
binomial and vernacular species names, management and uses, together with
their vertical and horizontal arrangement. After the system had been disaggregated in this way, contextual information on biophysical, socioeconomic
and evaluatory aspects were added at the appropriate system, land use category
or practice level.
The classification scheme was subsequently field tested on a national basis
in Sri Lanka (Sinclair, 1996) and on a regional basis in the western development region of Nepal (Sinclair, 1997). In Sri Lanka a national survey revealed
14 types of agroforestry practice, which were catalogued in terms of their

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structure, area and economic importance. Five of these practices (multilayered tree gardens, chena shifting cultivation, contour hedgerows, and
intercropping and use of multipurpose trees in tree-crop plantations) were of
widespread importance (Sinclair, 1996). In Nepal, a national survey (Amatya,
1996) identified 14 types of agroforestry, from which five practices were
considered relevant to an agroforestry research strategy for hillside farming
systems in the Western Development Region of the country (Sinclair, 1997).
These included trees and staple food crops on annually cultivated farmland,
perennial commercial crops under tree shade on farmland, domestication of
non timber forest products (from both overstorey and understorey species),
trees on grazing land and farm woodlots. In both countries application of the
classification scheme was useful in clarifying what agroforestry was occurring and facilitated organized description and quantification of agroforestry
practices for the purposes of defining research and extension needs.

Results and discussion

The results of this research are a new scheme for the definition and classification of agroforestry that is consistent with the data available in the AFSI
inventory and general system theory and has precedents in the agroforestry
and farming systems literature. This scheme is set out and explained below.
The role of trees in agricultural landscapes
To classify agroforestry practice, it was necessary to establish what agroforestry is and to clarify the level of organization at which it is appropriate
to distinguish units of classification. In this section agroforestry is defined
and a scheme for describing the role of trees on farms and in farming landscapes is presented.
Agroforestry
Considerable debate about the definition of agroforestry, that it is not necessary to rehearse here, preceded the widespread acceptance in the mid 1980s
of the following form of words adopted by ICRAF.
Agroforestry is a collective name for land-use systems and technologies
where woody perennials (trees, shrubs, palms, bamboos, etc.) are deliberately used on the same land management unit as agricultural crops and/or
animals, in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence. In agroforestry systems there are both ecological and economic interactions
between the different components.
(Lundgren and Raintree, 1982)
This definition has remained largely unchanged for well over a decade,

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although the word technology has tended to be replaced by practice and
the last sentence modified to clarify that interactions occur amongst woody
and non-woody components (Leakey, 1996). While it has served well in
helping to establish agroforestry as a distinct branch of agricultural science
that is rapidly becoming a scientific subject area in its own right (Sanchez,
1995), it does not distinguish between agroforestry as an interdisciplinary
approach to land use and as a set of integrated land use practices (Sinclair,
1991; Anderson and Sinclair, 1993). In fact, it invites concentration on the
latter, implying consideration of agronomic aspects at the field scale rather
than the impacts of trees on whole farm systems and their aggregated effects
at landscape and regional scales (Sinclair et al., 1994).
It is noticeable that most agroforestry research, in keeping with the agronomic view implied in the ICRAF definition, has tended to focus on mixtures
of few species in regular arrangements, whereas farmers and forest dwellers,
where agroforestry has developed as a significant land use, have tended to
practice agroforestry by either integrating many tree species in various
productive niches on their farms (Thapa et al., 1997; Tiffen et al., 1994) or
by managing biodiverse forest resources (Gouyon et al., 1993). As interest in
more floristically complex agroforestry practices has increased amongst
researchers, a number of authors have suggested a need to revisit the agroforestry definition. Leakey (1996) has highlighted the incremental nature of
increasing the number of trees on farms over considerable time periods, which
can be viewed as a successional sequence towards a mature agroforest at the
farm scale, with increasing ecological integrity and consequent stability and
sustainability benefits. Scaling up to landscape and regional levels, a mosaic
of agroforestry patches is seen to develop with different patches having different species, ecological structures and utility. This concurs with the
motivation for much temperate agroforestry, where the major interest is in
the aggregated effect of trees at a landscape scale. For example, trees are used
in integrated riparian management in the US to filter out nitrates and phosphates from water running into streams (Williams et al., 1997) and in Australia
to lower saline water tables to prevent salinization of agricultural land
(Schofield, 1993). de Foresta and Michon (1996) favour restricting the term
agroforest to multistrata systems that exhibit an ecological structure similar
to that of natural forest, reawakening the interest in mimicking the structure
of natural ecosystems in developing productive agroecosystems that was an
important strand of thinking when agroforestry was emerging as an international priority in the 1980s (Brunig and Sander, 1983; Oldeman, 1983;
Pickersgill, 1983).
These various views of agroforestry can be resolved in definitional terms
by distinguishing between agroforestry on the one hand as an approach to land
use and on the other as a set of integrated land use practices (Sinclair, 1991).
The ICRAF definition can be adapted to operate at the level of the practice
and an umbrella concept is introduced to encompass and characterize the
approach, resulting in a two stage definition:

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The approach is interdisciplinary and combines the consideration of woody
perennials, herbaceous plants, livestock and people, and their interactions
with one another in farming and forest systems. It embraces an ecosystem
focus considering the stability, sustainability and equitability of land-use
systems, in addition to their productivity (see Conway, 1987; Marten, 1988).
Consideration of social as well as ecological and economic aspects is
implied.
The set of land use practices involve the deliberate combination of trees
(including shrubs, palms and bamboos) and agricultural crops and/or
animals on the same land management unit in some form of spatial arrangement or temporal sequence such that there are significant ecological and
economic interactions between tree and agricultural components.
It is important not to restrict agroforestry practice to the integration of woody
and non-woody components, since some plants generally labeled as agricultural crops are themselves woody, particularly the plantation tree crops such
as rubber, tea, coffee and cacao. A large class of agroforestry practice involves
the integration of timber and/or shade trees amongst productive tree-crops
(Beer, 1987) and multistrata systems are receiving increasing attention (de
Foresta and Michon, 1996). The key integration in agroforestry is, in fact,
amongst people and trees, in as much as it is how people use trees that
ultimately determines whether an activity is usefully described as agroforestry.
Agricultural use of trees, where there is a frequent, regular and multiple
harvest (which excludes monocultural tree-crop plantations, whole scale
afforestation and opportunistic exploitation of natural vegetation with no
concern for its continuation), can often be most usefully classified as agroforestry.
The two stage definition proposed here is also consistent with recent
consensus on terminology in the US where agroforestry is seen as a set of
practices, the most prominent being: rows of timber trees in arable fields
(referred to confusingly as alley cropping in the US but quite distinct from
hedgerow intercropping in the tropics which also bears this label), windbreaks,
riparian buffer strips, silvopasture and forest farming (Merwin, 1997). In the
US the agroforestry approach is characterized as being intentional, intensive,
interactive and integrated and the application of these criteria are seen as
important to distinguish agroforestry from traditional disciplines of agronomy,
forestry and livestock production (Garrett et al., 1994). The requirement for
intensity is the only criterion in this list which is not embraced in the definitions proposed in this paper. This criterion can not be applied universally
because extensive, but nevertheless intentional and interactive use of mixed
vegetation is widespread in both the wet (Prance, 1990) and the dry (Breman
and Kessler, 1995) tropics and in more temperate conditions in Europe, use
of extensive livestock grazing in woodlands to benefit both farmers and
conservation is of increasing importance (McKnight, 1996). On a global basis,
therefore, intensity varies according to climate and purpose but it is entirely

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consistent for intensive agroforestry to be singled out in the US as of particular importance. Indeed the agroforestry practices of many regions may be
usefully characterized by such modifiers.
There are other important advantages in separating an interdisciplinary
approach to land use from specific integrated land use practices. Not least of
these is that taking a rational approach to assessing resources at farm and
landscape scales may result in deciding that discrete tree and agricultural
activities are preferable in certain circumstances to integrating trees and
agriculture on the same land. Agroforestry professionals should, therefore,
be able to contemplate and advise on the spectrum of land use options in a
particular context, from agricultural activity without trees, through agroforestry combinations to pure forest and woodland scenarios, rather than being
over zealous about one particular form of land use. The key point is how
best to meet the objectives of local stakeholders (which may include farmers,
forest users, other users of the countryside or people affected by how land is
used). The problem in the past has been that foresters were often not taught
much about agriculture or people and agriculturalists were educated without
adequate reference to trees, so that trees within farming systems or opportunities for them to be there, were often not recognized. The key point here
is that while an interdisciplinary approach to land use makes it possible to
realize integrated agroforestry practices where they are appropriate, it does
not restrict us to them.
Land use systems
There are two key aspects of systems thinking that are important in considering classification of agroforestry. Firstly, the central element of the definition of a system is that a system implies an entity which can be considered
to be whole. Spedding (1979) captures this in writing about agricultural
systems in his definition of a system as a group of interacting components,
operating together for a common purpose, capable of reacting as a whole to
external stimuli: it is unaffected directly by its own outputs and has a
specified boundary based on the inclusion of all significant feedbacks. This
definition is scale-neutral and can be applied at different hierarchical levels
to, for example, a plant, a crop stand, a farm or a planet, all of which may
be legitimately identified as systems, and what is appropriately seen as a
system itself at one level may be a component of a larger system at a higher
level. Secondly, it is possible to generalize about systems, this is done by using
a model (which is a simplified representation of the real system). When
applied to land use systems, as it has been in farming systems research and
extension (FSRE) and other related methods, this means that a general representation can be developed which is appropriate for a group of farms that
are sufficiently similar to one another to be considered together for the
purposes of improvement and the formulation of extension recommendations.
The terms farming system and recommendation domain as used in FSRE
(Simmonds, 1985), and land use system, preferred in the agroforestry liter-

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ature because it embraces forest systems and a range of scales upwards from
the farm level to that of the watershed and region (Raintree, 1990), are
effectively synonymous.
The significance of the FSRE concept of the farming system is that it
focuses attention on systems identified at a particular hierarchical level, that
at which human decisions regarding resource allocation for agricultural
activity (land, labour, capital) are made, which is fundamental to understanding
how land use systems function and hence the role of trees within them. At
this hierarchical level agroforestry very rarely operates as a whole system and
is far more frequently only part of larger and more complex land use systems,
and areas where trees are combined with agricultural production are often
complementary to other farming activity that may or may not also involve
trees. The partial nature of agroforestry in this respect is a fundamental
characteristic of how trees are incorporated on farms and requires that specific
agroforestry practices are understood within the system context in which they
occur and have their impact. The partial nature of agroforestry can be illustrated using examples from where trees have been incorporated in some
contemporary temperate farming systems (Figure 1). While it is possible for
a whole farm to constitute an agroforestry system (Figure 1a), as for example
extensive areas of New Zealand where Pinus radiata is grown on grazed
pasture (Knowles, 1991), it is more common for agroforestry to be contained
within particular parts of a farm business. In the UK in the 1960s, for example,
Bryant and May Ltd (manufacturers of matches) encouraged farmers to grow
poplars in rows in arable fields (Beaton, 1987), confining agroforestry to one
farm enterprise in an essentially mixed farm environment (Figure 1b). More
common still is for trees to be incorporated in a distinct part of an enterprise
as, for example, on a proportion of grazing land on an upland farm (Figure
1c), such that a sheltered environment is created where grass growth commences early in the spring (Sibbald et al., 1991).
Land use categories
It is evident from these examples, and even more so from consideration of
the bulk of AFSI system descriptions, that there are, in fact, four levels of
organization necessary to capture how trees are integrated on farms. These
are:
i) the overall system;
ii) different types of land within the system that have different land use
potential (which will be referred to as land use categories);
iii) practices (discrete groups of components such as trees, animals or crops
that are managed together); and
iv) groups of practices in space and time (such as rotations, where one distinct
group of components is followed by another).
Indeed, precedents can be found in the agroforestry literature for this sort of
analysis. Rocheleau (1987), for example, presents models of land use patterns

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Figure 1. Agroforestry as a system, an enterprise and part of an enterprise. Re-drawn from

Sinclair (1988).

in the Dominican Republic, India and Zambia that conform to this scheme.
Her analysis of chitemene shifting cultivation in Zambia (Figure 2a), for
instance, clearly distinguishes farm systems as characteristically comprising
three land use categories miombo woodland, homegardens and permanent
fields (Figure 2b). These are clearly types of land that are used for different
purposes and are not necessarily interchangeable. Thus, miombo woodland
is a particular vegetation type in the region where species of Brachystegia and
Julbernardia predominate on savanna ferrasols (Chidumayo, 1987), permanent fields are located close to settlements, have been cleared of trees and

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Figure 2. Depiction of the organization of the Chitemene system in northeast Zambia

(a) pictorially (adapted from Rocheleau (1987)) and (b) a simplified landscape analysis of the
same system in which shaded circles represent land use categories and white circles practices;
practices grouped in space or time are joined by broken lines.

are cultivated annually, whereas the homegardens are located even closer to
the home (they are effectively part of the settlement) and are more intensively
planted and managed on a continuous, year round basis. Factors that
commonly distinguish different categories of land use include:

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Distance from dwellings or other infrastructure found in a number of
systems in addition to the chitemene case above, compound farms in Nigeria
(Okafor and Fernandes, 1987), for example, constitute multilayered homegardens, associated with near fields (close to the compound but with fewer
crops than in the homegarden) and outlying fields (where tree and shrub
densities are lower and crops not suitable for growing in shade, such as maize,
predominate).
Inherent land type (altitude, slope, aspect, access to irrigation and soil fertility) for example, in Wales, UK hill farms would typically consist of some
intensively managed farmland close to the farm buildings (which in some
cases may be lowland), an area of ffridd or enclosed hill land that has been
improved at some point in its history and some access to mountain grazing,
which may or may not be enclosed. Cultivated land in the mid-hills of Nepal
(Fonzen and Oberholzer, 1984 see also Figure 3 below) is similarly characterized by constrasting relief and falls into two major categories locally
known as khet (lower slope, irrigated crop terraces) and bari (upper slope,
non-irrigated terraced land).
Predominant land usage and land ownership forest land may well have
fundamentally different land use potential than land that has been cleared of
trees, and often land usage is bound up with differences in ownership and user
rights. Common grazing or forest areas, while accessed by farmers, may be
used quite differently than land which they own or have private rights to use.

Figure 3. Land use diagram for typical farming systems in the eastern mid-hills of Nepal,
showing the role of livestock in nutrient transfer amongst land use categories.

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Livestock may roam across land use categories and transfer resources amongst
them and are discussed as a separate category below.
Temporal groups of practices
Within some of the land use categories identified in the chitemene system,
groupings of distinct practices through time can usefully be distinguished. The
chitemene plot (chitemene is the local Chibemba word meaning to cut), for
example, involves crop cultivation in an ash enriched field in miombo
woodland (a much larger area of woodland than is cultivated is pollarded
and branches collected, piled and burnt on the plot). The chitemene plots,
therefore, form a temporal group with the fallow phase of the shifting cultivation cycle (Figure 2b), a common phenomenon. It is more useful to see
these as two distinct practices connected in time rather than as one unit of
classification because they involve quite different components and management, but what happens in one phase affects the performance of the other.
An important output of the fallow phase is the subsequent soil fertility in the
cropping phase.
Tree rotations with quite distinct phases of agricultural integration are a
common feature of agroforestry. Thus, returning to the integration of poplars
on arable land in the UK, mentioned above, the rotation actually involved
continuing to grow arable crops between the rows of poplar for about seven
years, after which shading from the trees prevented ripening of grain crops
and the field was then sown to pasture and grazed. There was thus a distinct
silvoarable (or agrisilvicultural) phase followed by a silvopastoral phase but
at no time were trees, arable crops and animals all present. In terms of classification this is significant because the underlying ecology and management
of the two phases is fundamentally different and it is valuable to collect and
store information about silvoarable practices on the one hand and silvopastoral on the other and to consult such information with respect to understanding and managing each phase. There are many other examples of such
distinct temporal groupings of practices, in both temperate and tropical
systems. It is, for example, common to intercrop amongst coconut palms for
the first eight years or so after planting and again after they are 25 years old,
but there is little scope in the intervening years because little light penetrates
to the understorey (Nair, 1983). In the first intercropping phase, high light
levels are received in the space between palms and even grain crops can be
grown, but in the second intercropping phase, a fairly even but sparse shade
is cast over the understorey favouring shade tolerant intercrops including
shrubs (e.g. cacao), climbers (e.g. black pepper, using the palms for support)
and herbaceous plants (such as ginger and turmeric).
Spatial groups of practices
It is also useful to identify spatial relationships amongst some practices where
the functionality of one practice is affected by its location with respect to
another. For example, the homegarden in the chitemene system forms a spatial

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group with the live fence that surrounds it (Figure 2b). Clearly the live fence
in this case is identifiable as a discrete practice because it is managed differently than the rest of the garden it protects, for the purpose of protecting
it, by-products of fodder and/or fuelwood may also be obtained from the fence.
It is useful, therefore, to view the garden-live fence complex as a spatial group
of two practices because of their discrete functionality. It is clearly necessary
to identify the spatial linkage between the two practices, however, because
in the presence of marauding animals, the performance and prospects of a
garden surrounded by a live fence may be quite different from that of a garden
that is not so protected. By contrast, hedgerow intercropping where crop alleys
(several rows of crops) are interspersed with hedges of fast growing shrubs
that are coppiced every few weeks to provide a nitrogen-rich mulch for the
crop, is clearly a single integrated agroforestry practice, because the hedgerowcrop complex is managed together for a common purpose and there are very
significant ecological interactions between the shrub and agricultural crop
components.
Livestock
Domestic livestock may roam over different land use categories, or be housed
and fed material grown on different types of land or imported from outside
the system. In this way transfers of resources may be effected amongst land
use categories. In the mid hills of Nepal, for example, the fertility of privately
owned cultivated land is dependent upon nutrient transfers from common
property grazing and forest areas (Figure 3). Degradation of common property
forest areas has led to farmers incorporating more trees on private bari land
over the last decade (Carter and Gilmour, 1989) and developing a sophisticated local knowledge base associated with tree-crop interactions (Thapa et
al., 1995) and the feeding value of tree fodder (Thapa et al., 1997).
Classification of agroforestry practices
The preceding analysis identifies the agroforestry practice as the appropriate
unit for general classification, if we wish to group agroforestry activities that
have similar underlying ecology and prospects for management. Criteria are
then required to separate practices into different categories. This section
presents a two stage process of classification where major classes of agroforestry practice are distinguished on the basis of the components involved
and predominant land usage (Figure 4) and then within each major class,
variants based on the arrangement, density and diversity of the tree component are identified (Figure 5).
Primary classification
It is sensible to retain Nairs (1985) primary categorization on the basis of
the types of components involved, but to apply this to practices, as defined
above, rather than systems, and to distinguish (a) between arable crops and

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Figure 4. Primary classification of agroforestry practices based on predominant components and land usage. Plantation tree crops include rubber, oil
palm, cocoa, coffee, etc. Italics denote familiar names for classes or examples of practices; numbers refer to the place in the hierarchy in Figure 5 where
it is appropriate to continue classification.

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Figure 5. Secondary classification and description of agroforestry practices based on arrangement, density and diversity of components. Information
required for a minimum description of each class of practice is indicated in the column on the right.

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plantation tree crops and (b) tree and animal combinations involving pasture
and those that do not (Figure 4). It is also useful to include a category for
combinations of trees (including forests or woodland) and people where
neither domestic animals nor crops are primarily involved. Clearly, utilization
of trees by people, where a regular, frequent and multiple harvest is obtained,
is a legitimate form of agroforestry.
The second criterion used in the classification is the predominant use of
the land on which the practice takes place. There are clearly vast differences
in the decision making framework that governs a silvoarable practice such as
taungya (Lowe, 1987), where peasant farmers are permitted to crop between
trees during the establishment phase of plantation forestry, and one where
nitrogen fixing shrubs are introduced to agricultural land as a means of
producing green manure to be applied to agricultural crops. In the first case
the land is generally owned by a forest authority or company and the primary
purpose of land usage relates to forestry, the farmers have restricted rights
and the output of the silvoarable practice is an established forest. In the second
case the land is most often owned by the farmer who may have secure tenure
in relation to both land and trees, and the primary purpose of land usage is
to provide sustenance and income from agricultural crops for the farmer.
The third criterion refines the type of components used and the land on
which the practice occurs by distinguishing between types of tree cover
(natural vegetation, planted forest or plantation tree crops). Again this is an
important criterion for grouping practices with similar underlying ecology,
and as has been previously mentioned, agroforestry utilizing elements of
natural vegetation is receiving increasing interest.
Clearly this scheme (Figure 4) splits agroforestry up into a series of major
types on the basis of both ecological and management criteria. These broad
types of practice are generally applicable across agroecological zones and as
Nair (1985) has previously pointed out, it is not helpful to include bioclimatic criteria in a general classification scheme. Obviously, it is easy enough
to locate the types of practice identified within bioclimatic regions and we
would expect a temperate multilayered tree garden in the UK, for example,
to exhibit marked differences, as well as overall structural similarity, to one
in Sri Lanka.
Secondary classification and minimum description
Once the major types of practice have been identified, further classification
is usefully based upon the arrangement of the more permanent woody component, which may be dispersed throughout agricultural fields with intimate
interactions between the tree and agricultural components or the trees may
be arranged in some sort of grouping within the farm landscape, that is, it is
in some way zoned, so that the tree-crop interface length per unit area is
reduced and interactions amongst trees and amongst crop plants become more
important relative to interactions between the tree and crop components.
Common configurations are identified in Figure 5. Given a particular tree

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arrangement it is then possible to arrive at a minimum description of the
agroforestry practice based upon the density and species diversity.

Conclusion
Application of a landscape analysis that locates trees within the productive
niches that they are found within farms and forests, and the characteristic land
type, species and management with which they are associated, permits a
classification of agroforestry practice that retains key elements of previous
schemes while being consistent with systems analysis. The major gains are
to improve the resolution with which practices that have similar underlying
ecology and prospects for management are grouped and to broaden the
classification of agroforestry to more fully encompass peoples use of tree
resources and natural vegetation.

Acknowledgements
Tom Jenkins and Sam Foster, as consecutive computing officers at Bangor,
were responsible for implementation of the database and Alan Waugh and
Lorraine Gormley spent many hours analysing and enumerating system
descriptions using it. Agroforestry students at Bangor over the past decade
or so have helped to refine the scheme presented here through their use and
discussion of it as part of their course work. Michelle Jones and Karen Cooper
ably assisted in the production of the figures and general office support.

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