350 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
A third area in Latin America represents the humid and subhumid forests of
the Atlantic Coast of Central America and Mexico where encroaching urban areas
and slash-and-burn has reduced the extent of the northernmost extension of trop-
ical forests. The benchmark area in the Yucatan in south-east Mexico was managed
by Instituto Nacional de Investigación Forestales, Agricolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP).
Africa
A site in Cameroon represents the equatorial Congo Basin rainforest of Congo–
Kinshasa, Congo–Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Central African Repub-
lic, and Cameroon, where there is low but increasing population density and
largely indigenous slash-and-burn agriculture. The site includes a north–south
gradient, from rapid, spontaneous colonization around Yaoundé at the north,
though an intermediate situation at M’Balmayo, to very low population density at
Ebolowa in the southern end, close to the Gabon–Equatorial Guinea border. Site
headquarters are at the Institut de Recherche Agricole pour le Développement
(IRAD) at Nkolbisson, near Yaoundé, with strong support from the IITA Humid
Forest Centre.
South-East Asia
Sites in South-East Asia represent three quite different forest ecosystems. The
Sumatran benchmark area in Indonesia represents the equatorial rainforests of the
Indonesian and Malaysian archipelago. Located in Jambi and Lampung provinces,
it covers a broad gradient from primary forests in the Jambi area to degraded
Imperata grasslands in Lampung Province, including both indigenous farmers and
colonization projects as well as large-scale plantations and logging companies. The
site is managed from the Central Research Institute for Food Crops (CRIFC) of
the Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (AARD) in Bogor, Java.
A benchmark area in the Philippines represents the monsoonal forests, where
only forest remnants exist on steep mountain slopes and degraded grasslands
dominate the landscape. The sites in Claveria and Lantapan in Northern Mind-
anao, Philippines, are operated by the Philippine Council for Agriculture, For-
estry, and Natural Resources Research (PCARRD) together with a number of
other organizations. A benchmark area in the Ma Chaem watershed near Chiang
Mai, Thailand, represents the extensive area of subtropical hill forests of main-
land mountain South-East Asia found in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam
and southern China. The site was chosen to extend ASB research into higher-
elevation areas with broad ranges of slope conditions where issues of land-use
management often overlap with issues of watershed management. The bench-
mark site is managed by Thailand’s Royal Forest Department in close collabora-
tion with Chiang Mai University.
All benchmark sites fall within the tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf for-
est biome (WWF, 2001). To indicate how much the benchmark sites represent other
areas in the tropics, regional similarity classes were developed from a set of key
physical, environmental determinants of plant growth. The DOMAIN potential