LUSES - An International Joint Laboratory on the impacts of rapid Land Use Change on Soil Ecosystem Services

Executive summary

LUSES is an International Joint Laboratory (IJL) consisting of a consortium of Southeast Asian and French member institutions sharing a common research interest, namely: understanding co-evolving social and agricultural systems. Based on biophysical and socio-economical approaches, LUSES aims to foster regional and international scientific collaborations and build capacity in fields related to the impact of land use change on soil-related ecological services. The knowledge and capacity generated through LUSES is expected to assist with the sustainable management of the region’s constantly mutating agro-ecosystems. Soil ecosystem services depend upon the functioning of the Critical Zone (CZ) i.e. coupled chemical, biological, physical, and hydrological processes that support life at the Earth’s surface. In Southeast Asia, land use changes increasingly result from external triggers which correspond to strategies (policies, infrastructures, commercial networks etc.) that human societies design and adopt to harness natural resources and environmental services with the aim of using them to create productive ecosystems. Therefore, understanding the functioning of the CZ in such a context requires scientists to cross disciplines, from natural to social sciences.

Acknowledging that there is no “universal recipe” for the sustainable management of agro-ecosystems, LUSES central assumption is that learning from a diverse biophysical and socio-economical background will improve our ability to maintain soil ecosystem services in agro-ecosystems. To that extent, understanding processes at work in both the up- and low- lands will help identify the existence (or absence) of broad patterns linking land use changes to certain trends in soil ecosystem services change. To address this challenge, IJL LUSES will aim to provide new insight into the social modalities of rapid agricultural land use changes (e.g., intensification, extensification) and their impacts on variably degraded environments. IJL LUSES will also contribute to identify management techniques that maintain soil-related and hydrological services, including the control of pathogenic contaminants.

In a context of unprecedented expansion of perennial plantations in the Lower Mekong Basin, IJL LUSES initially focused on the impacts of the transition from annual to perennial crops on soil and hydrological services. Since 2014, given the increasingly diverse, complex and rapid context of land use change in the Lower Mekong Basin, the scope of IJL LUSES widened, with 3 main research themes that pertain to IRD’s priority research theme on biodiversity, resources and food security, namely, 1) impact of tree plantations on soil functioning and soil biodiversity; 2) management of organic matter for sustainable soil quality and plant production, and 3) effect of land use on stream-ground water interactions, overland flow genesis and the related ecosystem services in tropical agro-ecosystems. In addition LUSES includes an action that focuses on quality assurance across Southeast Asian soil analyses laboratories, as sound and reliable soil analyses are pivotal to the accurate characterization of soil ecosystems services.

For its second phase, starting in June 2017, IJL LUSES will keep this general structure with minor evolutions, namely new collaborations with 1) the University of Science Technology of Hanoi (USTH), one of the regional universities where a large share of LUSES staff is already teaching on a regular basis and is actively involved in setting up a new research laboratory on the Critical Zone. USTH is also a SE Asian higher education institution teaching (at the Bachelor and Master levels) subjects related to soil and water in the framework of a new international Master – “Sud Expert Sol” involving various universities: UPMC (France), Louvain La Neuve (Belgium) and possibly University of Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) and Antananarivo (Madagascar) and is one of the few higher education institutions that is in a position to become a member of AUF (Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie) and promote the use of the French language in Southeast Asia and 2) Division of Soil Science, Department of Plant and Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Chiang Mai University, to strengthen activities on soil functional ecology in high value crops such as coffee.

The second phase of LUSES will be coordinated by Dr Nivong Sipaseuth, Deputy Director General of the Department of Agricultural Land Management (DALaM), Vientiane Laos, and Dr Alain Pierret, Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences of Paris (iEES-Paris), research scientist with the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD).