AVH - Pedro David Fernandez

This project focuses on South America's dry forests, encompassing the Caatinga, Cerrado, Chiquitania, and Dry Chaco ecoregions. Despite being deforestation hotspots, these regions lack sufficient research and policy attention. Cattle ranching, a major deforestation driver, contributes to climate change through significant greenhouse gas emissions and holds economic importance. The need to make ranching more climate-smart is evident, but effective strategies are poorly understood. The objective of this project is to provide policy-relevant information and guidance for ranchers to enhance climate-smart practices. The project comprises three work packages:
WP1: Systematically reviewing available information on climate impact and mitigation potential of different cattle ranching systems in the dry diagonal. This includes assessing spatial data for mapping ranching systems and their climate impacts, identifying existing knowledge gaps, and proposing solutions, such as remote sensing or land-use models.
WP2: Focusing on the Argentinean Dry Chaco and Brazilian Cerrado, the project aims to reconstruct spatial and temporal dynamics in cattle ranching systems over the past three decades. This involves integrating spatial indicators into geospatial models, utilizing datasets on animal movements, vaccination, remotely-sensed metrics, land cover, and carbon stocks. The goal is to estimate CO2 emissions and sequestration, providing insights into the intensification and expansion of cattle ranching in deforestation frontiers.
WP3: Transforming scientific information gathered in WPs 1 and 2 into concrete management options for policymakers and ranchers to adopt more climate-smart practices. Using data from 100 ranches in the Argentine Dry Chaco, the project will examine productivity/carbon trade-offs across various management options. This involves combining productivity information with CO2 fluxes and integrating them into a multi-criteria optimization framework. The aim is to quantify efficiency gains through land-use planning scenarios, and testing practices like supplementation, stocking rate, weaning age, waste management, grazing intensity, and tree cover increase. Pilot sites will implement selected practices, and low trade-off solutions will be pursued for carbon certification credits.