AMBio: Alaotra Marshland Biodiversity, Madagascar

Alaotra is home to about 600,000 people, and constitutes the main rice growing area for Madagascar, as well as its biggest inland fishery. It contains 23,000 hectares of marsh area, which holds threatened and endemic fauna. Challenges to the Alaotra system include: a continuously growing human population that is putting pressure on ecosystem service provision; increasingly variable and unpredictable rainfall and therefore flood levels potentially linked to climatic changes; degradation of the rice infrastructure leading to reduced yields; encroachment by rice paddies into the marsh; marsh burning to open up fishing areas; invasion of degraded marsh areas by water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes). This species, one of the top 100 most invasive species listed by IUCN, is causing major negative environmental and economic impacts.

The purpose of AMBio is to gain a better understanding of the Alaotra socio-ecological wetland system to inform policy and decision makers for adapting management and conservation practices to balance conservation and development needs. AMBio has three research objectives:

• Ecological Integrity of the marshland system will be assessed by quantifying the linkages of different ecosystem dimensions: water quality, invertebrate community, vegetation structure and composition, fish community and E. crassipes abundance.
• Environmental Education drivers and barriers will be identified and described to develop economically sustainable teaching tools for primary public schools to prepare the next generation of resource users.
• Socio-cultural and Economic Feasibility will be assessed to develop and test regionally new techniques of using the invasive E. crassipes as economic alternative to reduce pressures on the wetland resource uses.

Partners

Funded Partners

• external pageUniversity of Hildesheimcall_made
• Madagascar Wildlife Conservation

Self-funded

• ETH ForDev