The study proposes to evaluate the ecosystem benefits of plantations on community and forest lands as perceived by the rural community and maximizing these benefits for land use planning through a modeling approach for meeting the needs of the rural community under a given set of constraints.  It will require an interdisciplinary approach involving academicians and scientists with silviculture, botany, social, resource use planning, forest extension, economics and system modeling expertise.  Reviews of the existing techniques, ongoing projects on similar land use systems, community participation in decision making will be carried out , so as to built the project base from the current state of affairs and knowledge and avoid duplication of work.

        To address the multiple interests and values of plantations on community and public lands, case studies and survey methods, which identify what is important to the community, will be adopted.  These benefits assessment for plantations will not be done in isolation but within a broader framework in real decision making by including socio-economic surveys.  A method for multidisciplinary landscape assessment for exploring biological diversity, environment and local people's perspectives in forest landscape (CIFOR, 2002) will be followed and suitably modified to develop the methodology fulfilling the requirements of European and Indian situations.  Such a methodology allows for a collaborative process to define and collect decisive information with regard to environmental impacts and local people's perspectives.  The field methods emphasize the landscape-scale characterization through high replication of small data-rich samples and community based assessments to assess local values of afforestation products and landscape units.  Community participation will be studied based on case studies of past and ongoing community and forest land plantation programmes in the project area. 

        Different activity groups follow specific methodology derived to achieve respective objectives.  Succinct methodology for different groups is as follows

AG 2: Training courses and workshops for Indian and EU partners will be organized.

AG 3: Collection of land use map data using rapid rural appraisal method.

AG 4: Review of literature.

AG 5: Field surveys and data collection will be carried out to assess the landscape planning practices and validation of model for EG&S quantification.

AG 6: Field surveys will be carried out to collect data pertaining to development and changing land use pattern. Specially structured questionnaires will be used to record the data.

AG 7: Review of literature.

AG 8: Statistical analysis and final report writing.