Vincent de Leijster

165 Appendices Appendices Chapter 5 (A5) Figure A5-1. Example of Google Earth imagery used to get information on changes in vegetation structure and to validate the time since transition to agroforestry as indicated by farmers. Chronosequence validation To validate the reported year of planting trees, we compared respondent answers with the database of KfW and with visual inspection of satellite imagery. Of the 74 farmers who participated in our study, 50 also participated in the KfW project, and only four of them reported a different year since transition than that recorded in the KfW database, and in these cases we followed the year reported by the farmer. Moreover, we validated the time since transition using Google Earth Engine and the available high spatial resolution imagery (CNES / Airbus) within the platform. A part of the study area was covered by images in 2005, 2013 and 2015; 35 out of the 74 farms had imagery of sufficient quality. We used this imagery to check whether changes in vegetation structure over time could be identified (Appendix Figure A5-1). We could confirm that the time since transition was plausible for 30 of the farms covered by imagery, i.e., that trees were planted between 2013-2015 or 2005-2013 or before 2005. The five farms for which years were mismatched, already had trees before the farmers started with the project. We assumed that in these farms additional trees were planted when farmers joined the project. We retained the age of transition as reported by the farmers, as the imagery did not allow to find specific planting dates or identify specific changes in tree densities or small changes vegetation structure.