The Montado Living Lab: Catalysing soil health through formal and informal co-construction networks

Abstract

The Montado, a complex farming system, faces significant threats from global pressures pushing towards either agricultural intensification or land abandonment, despite its crucial role in delivering high-quality production alongside diverse ecosystem services. We introduce the Montado Living Lab - Montado LL (Filipe et al, 2025), a Living Lab centered on the Portuguese agro-silvo-pastoral system Montado, and the Tertulia’s do Montado (Guimarães et al, 2024), a transdisciplinary dialogue platform that aim to collectively frame the sustainability problems of the Montado for better alignment of research and practice through the integration of shared knowledge into real-world context. This study analyses how the formal structure and collaborative approach of the Montado LL and the unformal structure of Tertúlias do Montado facilitate the generation of contextspecific knowledge, testing and validation of innovations, overall driving processes for the adoption of sustainable soil and other management practices and, the production of evidence-based knowledge to inform, adapt and develop policies.