Shaded Understory is a project I conducted from 2017 to 2018 with the help of farmers, workers, community members, and agricultural support people in and around a selection of cacao agroforests on the Island of Trinidad, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. Much of Trinidadian cacao is grown in biodiverse agroforestry systems.
Slide 1/4: A Rich Cultivationscape of Affordances. Image Credit: Moos van Caspel 2018. 
Slide 2/4: Ethnobotanical Case Study. Image Credit: Moos van Caspel 2018. 
Slide 3/4: Are people using these plants? Yes! Image Credit: Moos van Caspel 2018. 
Slide 4/4: Enriching the Cultivationscape. Image Credit: Moos van Caspel 2018.
This case study investigates how this biodiversity contributes to the well-being and (beyond monetary) livelihoods of those who work with the land: both the farmers and the workers they hire. This contribution comes not just from reducing the necessity to spend the money they earn on items they can find in the agroforestry system, it comes also from benefits to self and community that are not easily quantifiable. Social ties, for example, are forged as a result of interactions with these plants, ties within and across religious and racial groups that would not otherwise have been likely. In this way biodiverse cultivationscapes, the lands on which crops are cultivated, play a key role in (re)creating communities and making contributions to social well-being beyond the geographic boundaries of the agroforestry system.
You can engage with the various outputs of this project below.
Writing
The findings of this project culminated in a master’s thesis, entitled A Shaded Understory: Interacting with Associated Species in Trinidadian Cacao Agroforestry Systems, which was successfully reviewed and defended in 2019 at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Click here to open, read, and download the file in a new browser window.
Gallery
Madeline Donald 