Food forests are gaining attention in the Netherlands as a concept that holds the promise of delivering a variety of ecosystem services our society depends upon. However, there are no insights available what a food forest could look like on peat soils nor what its environmental benefits could be. At the same time the Dutch peat area represents 12% of the total agricultural area and is subjected to soil subsidence releasing carbon dioxide, accounting for 2.5% of the national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This thesis designed a food forest for the Dutch peat area and assessed it on three ecosystem services being: food provisioning, climate regulation and wildlife habitat provisioning. The results were put into perspective by comparing them to the currently predominant land-use for organic milk production. The plant species were selected based on selection criteria which took into account the environmental conditions and marketing potential. Yield estimates were made based on documented yields and proxies. GHG emissions and carbon sequestration potentials were determined by both available comparative literature and calculations. For the indications of wildlife habitat provisioning birds were taken as indicator species group and the attractiveness was determined by available literature. The proposed peatland food forest (PFF) consists of 21 different plant species that were estimated to produce a mean dry weight yield of 863 kg/ha/a over the first 20 years with a maximum of 1569 kg/ha/a. Furthermore, the PFF is expected to store between 0.37 and 0.52 Mg CO2 eq./ha/a compared to the current emissions of 15.8 Mg CO2 eq./ha/a. Finally, the PFF provides a habitat that is likely to attract more but different bird species than the current landscape, including a greater number of endangered species. The results are in range with existing literature on either food forests or swamp forests and highlight the potential of food forest on peat soil to contribute to sustainable food provisioning, reduction of GHG-emissions, and preservation of wildlife habitats. This study promotes to conduct a field experiment to validate the promising initial results.

The cultivation of palm oil has many adverse social and environmental impacts. The high level of biodiversity that is native to areas where palm oil plantations occur is at risk. Various measures are taken, such as the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The RSPO certification is a sector governance measure that indicates which management and operations interventions have to be implemented to protect the public interest – countering negative social and environmental impacts. No research has been done on the impact of RSPO certification and the plantation size on biodiversity. The research question of this thesis is “do RSPO certification and plantation size influence the level of biodiversity of palm oil plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia?” Three open source online data sets from Global Forest Watch containing information on plantations were used. These spatial data sets were combined with Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) species observations data. From GBIF, four taxa were selected to be used in this study, known to be impacted by palm oil cultivation: birds, lizards, primates and small mammals. The majority of the GBIF observations that laid within the studied plantation data set, however, were bird observations (93.0%). Only 1.8% of the GBIF observations laid within the palm oil plantations. Data analysis indicated that there is no significant difference between RSPO and non-RSPO-certified plantations in terms of biodiversity. The obtained results imply that the measures that are taken by plantations to obtain the RSPO certificate do not affect the level of biodiversity and therefore certification does not protect the species living on plantations better when compared to plantations that are not RSPO-certified. Results also indicate that biodiversity is not influenced by the size of a plantation – small, medium or large. The proposed research was the first attempt in getting insight into the effectiveness of certification and small-scaled plantations – in other words plantation size – on biodiversity levels. It can be concluded that the effectiveness of the two measures has not been proven yet. Suggestions for further research are done, in which higher quality data sets and larger numbers of observations are of importance.