An Assessment of Health and Sustainability of a Smallholder-Dominated Tropical Highlands Ecosystem - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 184

of implementing the action plans and strategies. Expected secondary outputs were
those changes in the system attributes resulting from the cascading effects of the
implemented action plans. Changes and patterns in indicators were evaluated based
on these expectations to decide whether these were met and to evaluate the suitabil-
ity of the indicators, the validity of some community assertions, and the impact of
community goals on the agroecosystem.
The implications of the spatial and temporal trends in the indicators in terms of
generic system health attributes such as productivity, stability, integrity, adaptability,
resilience, efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness, vigor, and equitability were assessed
based on the communities cognitive maps. Discrete dynamic models based on the
cognitive maps were used in this assessment. Details to the models are provided in
Chapter 4.

7.3 Results

7.3.1 s p A t i A l t r e n D s i in t h e r e s e A r C h e r -p r o p o s e D i in D i C A t o r s
Figure 7.1 is a scatterplot of the first two dimension of an SCA of village- against
researcher-proposed LUU-level indicators measured in 1999. Together, they
accounted for 36.5% of the total inertia. Most of the villages were clustered together
in the upper right quadrant, except Kameria, which was in the lower left, and
Kihenjo, Githima, and Gitwe, all of which were in the lower right. Dimension 1 has
high negative weights on income/acre of cash crops and income/inputs for cash crops
and higher positive weights on kale yield and production of traditional foods. Factor
levels with high absolute loads along dimension 2 were water expenditure, distance
to water source, and coliform counts. Figure 7.2 shows a similar scatterplot using the
January 2000 indicator data. The distribution pattern of column points was similar
to that from the 1999 data. The characteristics of the first two dimensions, account-

187 60

5

1 9

1

6

93

0

1 3

96

1 1

3

12

90

12 1 1 9

42

127

0

Dim 2

fIGuRe 7.1 Scatterplot of dimension 1 against dimension 2 in a simple correspondence
analysis of village against researcher-proposed land-use unit (LUU)-level indicators mea-
sured in 1999. See CD for color image and key.