Compare methods

	Seasonal Food Availability Calendar	Agroecosystem Analysis
Field	Food Agriculture Studies	Food Agriculture Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1987
Originator	Robert Chambers (Participatory Rural Appraisal tradition)	Gordon R. Conway
Type	Participatory visual mapping of seasonal variation in food and livelihoods	Systems-diagnosis pipeline for agroecosystem performance
Seminal source	Chambers, R. (1994). The origins and practice of participatory rural appraisal. World Development, 22(7), 953-969.	Conway, G. R. (1987). The properties of agroecosystems. Agricultural Systems, 24(2), 95-117.
Aliases	Seasonal Calendar, Participatory Seasonal Calendar, Seasonality Mapping, Food Availability Calendar	AEA, Agroecosystem Properties Analysis, Conway Agroecosystem Analysis, Agroecosystem Diagnosis
Related	3	4
Summary	The Seasonal Food Availability Calendar is a participatory field method, rooted in Robert Chambers's Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), in which community members themselves construct a visual chart of how food, livelihoods, and stresses vary across the year. Along a time axis of months or local seasons, participants map the timing and relative intensity of rainfall, planting and harvests, food stocks, market prices, labor demand, hunger, and illness, often using stones, beans, or marks to score each period. The resulting calendar makes the community's lean season visible and explains its drivers — when harvests run out, prices spike, work disappears, and hunger peaks. It is valued for surfacing local knowledge about seasonality that surveys taken at one point in time cannot capture.	Agroecosystem analysis (AEA) is a systems-diagnosis framework, formalized by Gordon Conway in 1987, that characterizes any agricultural system through four properties: productivity, stability, sustainability, and equitability. Rather than judging a farming system by yield alone, AEA treats the agroecosystem as an ecological system shaped by human management and asks how much it produces, how reliably it produces it across seasons and shocks, whether it can maintain output over the long run, and how its benefits are distributed among the people who depend on it. The analyst bounds a system at an appropriate hierarchical level — plot, field, farm, watershed, or region — and uses interdisciplinary teams, ranked questions, and simple structured diagrams to surface the key relationships and the trade-offs among the four properties that drive design and policy choices.