CIFOR's Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment approach

The Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment (MLA) approach, initiated in 1999 by researchers at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in collaboration with various partners, combines a technical survey of species, habitats and landscape locations with an assessment of their significance to local people. It fits the CIFOR mission to conduct research relevant to improving natural resource management and benefiting people. Its main claim to distinctiveness lies in its multi-disciplinary range of methods. The MLA landscape is defined by the people that live in it: how they define its land and vegetation types, the way they relate to it and use it: ‘a holistic and spatially explicit concept that is much more than the sum of its components: terrain, soil, land cover and use, […] a cultural construction’ (Sheil et al., 2003). The geographical scale of the landscape depends on the distances or (territories) that people cover to meet their livelihood needs. None of the studies explicitly explored local communities' concepts of ‘biodiversity’ and the term was never used with them. Rather the emphasis was on the environment and landscape in which people lived.

Since the first survey was conducted, others have used the approach in similar surveys. This chapter describes the basic methods; then compares the application and outcomes of the approach in ten case studies.

The basic approach

The approach and initial methods were developed during an extended two-month workshop and field trial in Malinau, East Kalimantan.