With reference to India.

Agroforestry is now recommended as a core subject in the curriculum of undergraduate courses of forestry, horticulture and agriculture. Keeping the needs of the students in mind this book has been written. Besides fulfilling curriculum requirements of the students, it will also help them to prepare for various competitive examinations. The plant lovers may also find this book worth reading. This book has been divided into twenty chapters covering all aspects of agroforestry including concepts, systems classifications, soil productivity, tree-crop interaction, watershed and wasteland management through agroforestry, climate change adaptation and mitigation, carbon sequestration, urban agroforestry, agroforestry design & diagnosis, economics and extension of agroforestry.

This college-level textbook summarizes the state of current knowledge in the rapidly expanding field of agroforestry. The book, organized into 25 chapters in six sections, reviews the developments in agroforestry during the past 15 years and describes the accomplishments in the application of biophysical (plant and soil related) and socioeconomic sciences to agroforestry. Although the major focus of the book is on the tropics, where the practice and potential of agroforestry are particularly promising, the developments in temperate zone agroforestry are also discussed. This text is recommended for students, teachers, and researchers in agroforestry, farming systems, and tropical land use.

Agroforestry has come of age during the past three decades. The age-old practice of growing trees and crops and sometimes animals in interacting combinations – that has been ignored in the single-commodity-oriented agricultural and forestry development paradigms – has been brought into the realm of modern land-use. Today agroforestry is well on its way to becoming a specialized science at a level similar to those of crop science and forestry science. To most land-use experts, however, agroforestry has a tropical connotation. They consider agroforestry as something that can and can only be identified with the tropics. That is a wrong perception. While it is true that the tropics, compared to the temperate regions, have a wider array of agroforestry systems and hold greater promise for potential agroforestry interventions, it is also true that agroforestry has several opportunities in the temperate regions too. Indeed, the role of agroforestry is now recognized in Europe as exemplified by this book, North America, and elsewhere in the temperate zone. Current interest in ecosystem management in industrialized countries strongly suggests that there is a need to embrace and apply agroforestry principles to help mitigate the environmental problems caused or exacerbated by commercial agricultural and forestry production enterprises.

Agroforestry is the cultivation, by farmers, of trees or other woody plants with crops or pasture. Its scientific study is attracting great interest and increasing funding because of its potential to produce sustainable agricultural systems and agroforestry is now included in most university and college courses covering land use subjects. Tropical Agroforestry is the first book that provides an analytical account of the principles, as well as the practices, of agroforestry within the context of the needs of land occupiers and, in so doing, describes the various specialist aspects that are now emerging as part of this discipline. The main objective throughout the book is to present, in a readable way, the underlying functional basis of woody/non-woody plant mixtures and to give a balanced account of how agroforestry can contribute to sustainable production from land. Understanding the biology of multipurpose trees is a key to this.

The Scientific Forestry and the associated management practices received significant attraction around the world which resulted in the birth of professional forestry education. In India, the professional forestry education was started in the year 1985 and currently offered at several State Agricultural and Central Universities. The Forestry and Agroforestry has also been incluzed as a subject in various under graduate and Post graduate program of State Agricultural and other conventional universities. This professional education in forestry and introduction of forestry courses to other degree programmes demand a comprehensive text book encompassing all the facets of forests. Against this backdrop, the current book on Introduction To Forestry & Agroforestry is conceived to cater to the needs of professionals in B. Sc (Forestry), B.Sc (Agriculture), B.Sc. (Horticulture) and B.Sc (Sericulture) courses offered at State Agricultural Universities and undergraduate programme of Botany and Environmental Science courses offered at Conventional Universities. Besides, the book can also act as a fast and ready made reference material for the graduates aspiring for State and Central Forest Service Examinations. For any beginner in professional forestry education and competitive examinations, this book will be an asset to understand and learn the principles and practices of forestry coupled with other recent developments in forestry sector.