Depending on the data, cache memory is a bridging solution for yield data for example.Acquired in-field moisture or temperature data which need to be displayed to the farmer with low latency a direct switch to the suggested resilient infrastructure must be given.Concrete solutions for machine data, which have been tested in the field, were shown in the iGreen project with the so-called “Machine Connector”.For data, only allowing low latencies, the LWN directly has to be used in case of an interrupted internet connection.Again, here farmers have to diagnose and define which data they need, with which latency, and accordingly design the FDFS.In any case, if farmers have to calculate with interruptions, a parallel, hybrid data acquisition, like in the suggested FDFS, seems best practice.On-farm data storage on the farm server can be erased if cloud computing of a certain task is completed and data safety is guaranteed.The digitization span amongst farmers reaches from no network coverage at all, to farms that use autonomous robots controlled with real time data.For the latter, our approach in the FDFS at Level V makes perfect sense.However, most farmers in a worldwide perspective have no internet at all or only a low bandwidth landline connection to the office area.Solutions that use, and should use, the prior way over an internet connection but without providing desktop solutions, are strongly limited from the start on such remote farms.These farms indicate most reasonable the concern of this paper and might directly take level four or five into account of their digitization process.Last but not least, it is difficult for farmers who already invested in and implemented proprietary solutions of a few OEM brands to switch to or integrate open, standardized, and flexible solutions.APIs and converter plugins are needed for seamless data exchange which is often in conflict with the business model of the manufacturer.Once more a case where it is the responsibility of the OEMs to provide interoperable solutions.Advantages of strengthened interoperability not just for the farmers are expected, but also for the OEMs who might integrate their innovations in the part wise proprietary environment of another OEM.Farms, as mentioned here, seem to be in the same situation as the partners of the iGreen project who decided on the following strategy to ensure interoperability: “iGreen touches on so many actors, that a traditional top-down, up-front standardization of document formats and APIs would be so costly and time-consuming that it would be impossible to realize within the frames of the project.Instead,rolling benches the iGreen project used semantic technologies as an attractive alternative to costly and time-consuming standardization efforts by committee”.
Nature-based Solutions seek to maximize nature’s ability to provide ecosystem services that help humans address issues such as climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and food security.The IUCN defines NbS as “actions to protect, sustainably manage, and restore natural and modified ecosystems that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, simultaneously providing human well-being and biodiversity benefits”.A key challenge in ecosystem management is the loss of agrobiodiversity as a result of agricultural intensification.NbS in agriculture can reduce the adverse environmental impacts of intensive modern agriculture and sustain agricultural production.Many traditional agricultural production systems, such as agroforestry, have the potential to address natural resource management challenges, provide societal benefits, and conserve biodiversity.They create complex and diversified farmsteads with the goal of producing sustainable and long-term outputs, as in ecological or sustainable agriculture.Low external input usage, integration of different life forms and sustainable intensification are the hallmarks of these cultural systems.Such traditional land use systems also represent the accumulated wisdom and insights of farmers who have engaged with the environment without recourse to outside in-puts, capital, or scientific skills over millennia of cultural and biological transformations and are often regarded as time-tested examples of sustainable land use practices; the tropical home gardens are a case in point.These are traditional multi-strata agroforestry systems , which provide a range of ecosystem services such as provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural services.Although coconut is cultivated in several parts of the tropics, it is the most important crop in Kerala – “the Land of Coconut Trees”.Indeed, the euphonious Malayalam word, Keralam , is derived from two root words: Kera, which means coconut tree, and Alam, which means land.Kerala is the south-western state of the Indian Union.The coconut palm is, in fact, the “nucleus” of the Kerala home gardens , around which the other constituents are orchestrated .Although agroecology emerged as a distinct branch of science in the early twentieth century, the ecological underpinnings of agriculture in Kerala are much older.
In fact, Krishi Gita, a 15th-century Malayalam poem, explains the environment-friendly cultivation systems of medieval Kerala, including that of coconut palms.This paper examines the autecological characteristics of coconut, besides the role of CBFS in providing nature-based solutions to various ecological challenges, with special reference to Kerala.It focuses on three specific questions: what natural resource challenges CBFS addresses, what ecosystem services CBFS provides, and what biodiversity outcomes CBFS offers.It also examines the functional dynamics and vegetation structure of complex coconut-based land use systems.Aspects like varietal development, cultural practices, and pest and disease management, which are discussed in detail elsewhere, are, however, not focused here.Coconut is one of the earliest among the domesticated plants.Based on the occurrence of two genetically distinct sub-populations corresponding to the Pacific and the Indo-Atlantic oceanic basins, Gunn et al.postulated two geographical origins of the coconut palm: Southeast Asia and the southern margins of the Indian subcontinent.India has a long history of coconut cultivation spanning over three millennia.The crop is inseparably intertwined with the socio-cultural heritage and economic well being of the people of Kerala, as in other coconut-growing regions of the world.It is ingrained in folklores and has been celebrated by poets over centuries.For instance, Krishi Gita, the 15 century text, describes the importance of coconut growing in the livelihood of the residents of medieval Kerala.Apart from being an oilseed crop of enormous significance , it also yields food, drinks, timber, and fibre, besides being an ornamental species of prominence.This astounding range of products and services from the palm justifies the sobriquet “Tree of Life” or “Kalpavriksha”.Being a portable source of diet, water, and fuel, it is thought to have played a pivotal role in pre-historic migrations and the growth of civilization in the wet tropics.According to the FAO statistics , the Philippines, Indonesia, and India are the three largest coconut-producing countries in the world, with 3.5, 3.0, and 2.2 million hectares, respectively.
With over 80% of the area and 62% of the global output, South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands dominate the scene.Coconut is also popular in many other tropical and subtropical nations, including those along the African coasts and in LAC , where they grow naturally as well as in planted and managed stands.A large proportion of such planted and managed stands of the palm are in smallholder farms of size less than 5 ha; the farms in Asia, the main coconut-growing region of the world, are, however, much smaller.And in Kerala, more than 98% of the operational holdings are either small or marginal.Most coconut-growing areas were once forested and, in some regions like the Pacifific Islands, where coconuts are produced, the crop is still the primary cause of deforestation.For example, in Vanuatu , the development of large “coconut estates” became a dominant land-use activity during the 20th century by the Europeans, and forests and old tree-fallows were transformed into coconut plantations.A large number of smallholder coconut plantations that substantially altered the indigenous farming systems followed this.Thaman et al.reported a gradual shift away from the traditional mixed agroforestry systems in the Pacific islands in which fruit trees and other culturally useful trees,ebb and flow bench such as coconut, breadfruit , traditional banana and plantain clones , citrus , Malay apple and Polynesian vi-apple were dominant, to monocultural production of commodities.Likewise, detrimental environmental effects of coconut monoculture have been noted in Western Samoa, central Indonesia, and Vanuatu.Although tropical deforestation caused by palm oil production is well-known , deforestation by coconut oil production and its biodiversity implications are rarely discussed.Furthermore, the majority of coconut is produced in tropical island nations, where “endemism richness” – an index that combines endemism and species richness – exceeds mainland regions by a factor of 9.5 and 8.1 for plants and vertebrates, respectively, and deforestation may result in the extinction of the endemic species.Furthermore, conservationists classify coconut as an invasive species that threatens biodiversity in the Chagos Archipelago.However, such evidence is scarce elsewhere, and coconut plantations are an important part of the cultural landscape in many countries providing employment, food, and artisanal products, as well as playing an important role in ecological restoration.In Kerala, coconut palm is the most extensively cultivated crop.It grows virtually everywhere in the state.Kerala has a diverse range of land forms that includes mountains, riverine deltas, wetlands, and ecoclimatic conditions that range from high rainfall zones to rain-shadow regions.The soil, climate, flora and fauna of these ecoregions are also correspondingly diverse.The principal crops of the state, including coconut, are cultivated in most of these ecoregions since time immemorial.Coconut is a major crop in the lowlands of Kerala, but the midlands and the slopes of the highlands are also suited for its cultivation.The western seaboard, the shorelines of lagoons and backwaters, and the banks of creeks in Kerala are profusely flecked with this palm.
The palm abounds on the fringes of the meandering valleys that surround the numerous hills – a distinctive feature of the state’s topography.Despite being a prominent crop in the lowlands and midlands, coconut cultivation has gradually expanded to the high-altitude regions , which may not be ideally suited for the crop in terms of its eco-climatic requirements.Consistent with the importance of the palm in the bio-cultural legacy and livelihood of the people of Kerala, there was a dramatic increase in the area of coconut in the state during the second half of the 20th century.In fact, area under coconut increased by 106% between 1955 and 2000.Conversion of paddy fields and other croplands has contributed much to this so-called “coconut boom”, which, however, faded subsequently.Indeed, the state’s coconut area decreased dramatically between 2010–11 and 2015–16, but it increased significantly after that, by about 1,00,000 ha in 2018–19.It should be noted, however, that it is difficult to estimate the area under coconuts precisely due to a lack of standardized procedures for estimating areas when the species grows at different densities and is planted and nurtured as a crop either alone or in combination with other species.In multi-strata systems, extinction of incoming solar radiation by the tree canopies warrants the use of shade-tolerant or sciophytic species as inter-crops.Factors such as stage of development of coconut palms, growth habit/crown characteristics of the associated tree components and their planting geometry, determine stand leaf area index, and in turn, the magnitude of light extinction.Optical density of multi-species systems especially involving woody perennials are clearly lower than that of monocropping systems owing to the higher stand leaf area index in the former.In line with this, Kumar and Kumar, in an experimental study involving 17-year and 8-month-old coconut palms and three 3 year and 9-month-old dicot multipurpose trees, found that the stand leaf area index varied from 5.24 to 7.15 for coconut+ dicot multipurpose tree systems as opposed to 4.9 for coconut monoculture.Reduced light availability beneath the multi-strata canopy may reduce sub-canopy yields of some crops , although yield levels may also increase or remain the same in some situations, reflectsing differential understory performance of crops.Shade-loving/tolerant crops maintain positive net photosynthesis even when the understory irradiance is relatively low.Phenotypic plasticity in certain plant traits, particularly those morphological features for optimizing light capture, is also high in shadetolerant species, which helps to explain their improved understory performance.In an exploratory attempt, the understory species that are widespread in the CBFS were classified as “shade sensitive,” “shade intolerant,” “shade-tolerant,” and “shade-loving”.However, there may be varietal and cultivar differences in adaptability to shade even within the same species, which obscures such classification schemes.Wright et al.postulated that there are a few extremely shade-tolerant and a few extremely light-demanding species, with the bulk of species, however, having intermediate and hence overlapping light preferences.Herbs like colocasia or taro , elephant foot yam , ginger , tannia , turmeric , yams , and many medicinal and aromatic plants are widely recognized as examples of shade-loving/tolerant crops.