The Shade Tree Advice Smartphone Application makes the shade tree recommendations readily available to the public and private extension agents in Uganda that guide farmers with on-farm advice regarding climate change adaptation and mitigation.
To offset the impact of Climate change, adaptation strategies in coffee farming requires low cost and multipurpose solutions, such as shade trees which have multiple ecosystem services beneficial in building resilience in smallholder livelihoods. Appropriate tree-selection is necessary as trees provide both services and challenges in agroforestry farming system. Services include the provision of shade, yield enhancements, food, and timber among others, while challenges include competition for nutrients and the increase in occurrences of pests and diseases. As such, selecting appropriate shade trees is paramount for maximizing tree-based ecosystem services while minimizing disservices. However, farmers lack the tools and technical support to summarize such information to guide on-farm tree selection, and often, shade tree recommendations only focus on the tree benefits to the crop, yet farmers also keep trees for other purposes. The Shade Tree Advice Smartphone Application provides various selection criteria for suitable tree species that provide a variety of ecosystems services (ES) geared for both livelihoods and climate change adaptation in different local environmental conditions.
In collaboration with public and private sector partners, IITA has developed the Shade Tree Advice Smartphone Application: a decision support tool intended to guide coffee farmers on the selection of appropriate shade trees taking into account local conditions as well as needs and preferences of smallholder farmers while maximizing ecosystem services. The app provides site-specific recommendations on appropriate tree species and has been populated with a tree library based on ranking exercises carried out in Central Uganda region-Greater Luwero, Eastern Uganda Mt Elgon region-Bulambuli district and Northern Uganda-Gulu, Lira, Nyowa, Oyam and Apac. The library is intended to give users detailed information on specific trees identified from the ranking exercises conducted and links to external tree databases.