Invertebrate Community Responses to Land-Use Change in Zambia

As agriculture expands across Sub-Saharan Africa, can we feed growing populations without losing the natural services vital to farming?

The Global Food and Environment Institute are pleased to host Dr Hemant Tripathi's webinar, 'Invertebrate Community Responses to Land-Use Change in Zambia'. The event is free but registration is required. Register on Eventbrite.

Join us on Wednesday 25 February, 12.00 to 12.40pm, to hear Dr Tripathi present findings from Zambia's Chibombo district, where he examined how landscape transformation affects the invertebrates that underpin agricultural productivity, crop pests, their natural predators, pollinators, and decomposers.

The results reveal a "mosaic buffer effect": heterogeneous landscapes maintain ecosystem services far better than direct forest-to-cropland conversion. Dr Tripathi will share practical insights on why intensification without landscape planning may ultimately backfire, and how spatial complexity is essential for farming system resilience.

The session will start with welcomes and introductions from the Chair, Prof Stephen Whitfield, followed by a 20-minute presentation by Dr Hemant Tripathi. Afterwards, there will be 10 minutes for questions and answers.

"Direct forest-to-cropland conversion creates severe, irreversible losses in natural pest control—but there's a middle ground." This research is part of the FoSTA-Health project, a UKRI GCRF-funded collaboration between the University of Leeds, Wageningen University and the University of Zambia examining food system transformation across southern Africa.

Dr Hemant is a PostDoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, working on the EU-funded FoSTA-Health project. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher on the GCRF-funded AFRICAP project. His research examines biodiversity and ecosystem services in tropical agricultural systems, with a focus on how landscape transformation affects invertebrate communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. He completed his PhD at the University of Edinburgh's School of Geosciences.