Agriculture is expanding rapidly across the tropics. While cultivation can boost socioeconomic conditions and food security, it also threatens native ecosystems. Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), which is grown pantropically, is the most productive vegetable oil crop worldwide. The impacts of oil palm cultivation have been studied extensively in Southeast Asia and - to a lesser extent - in Latin America but, in comparison, very little is known about its impacts in Africa: oil palm's native range, and where cultivation is expanding rapidly. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale research programme - the Sustainable Oil Palm in West Africa (SOPWA) Project - that is evaluating the relative ecological impacts of oil palm cultivation under traditional (i.e., by local people) and industrial (i.e., by a large-scale corporation) management in Liberia. Our paper is twofold in focus. First, we use systematic mapping to appraise the literature on oil palm research in an African context, assessing the geographic and disciplinary focus of existing research. We found 757 publications occurring in 36 African countries. Studies tended to focus on the impacts of palm oil consumption on human health and wellbeing. We found no research that has evaluated the whole-ecosystem (i.e., multiple taxa and ecosystem functions) impacts of oil palm cultivation in Africa, a knowledge gap which the SOPWA Project directly addresses. Second, we describe the SOPWA Project's study design and-using canopy cover, ground vegetation cover, and soil temperature data as a case study-demonstrate its utility for assessing differences between areas of rainforest and oil palm agriculture. We outline the socioecological data collected by the SOPWA Project to date and describe the potential for future research, to encourage new collaborations and additional similar projects of its kind in West Africa. Increased research in Africa is needed urgently to understand the combined ecological and sociocultural impacts of oil palm and other agriculture in this unique region. This will help to ensure long-term sustainability of the oil palm industry-and, indeed, all tropical agricultural activity-in Africa.M.D.P. thanks and acknowledges funding from the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission (MACC), BBSRC Impact Acceleration Account (BB/S506710/1), St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, Varley Gradwell Travelling Fellowship in Insect Ecology (University of Oxford), Johanna Darlington Trust Fund, Cambridge Philosophical Society, and from Jesus College Oxford (through R.R.). M.D.P and B.F. thank and acknowledge funding from the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund. C.A.M.M. thanks and acknowledges funding from King’s College Cambridge. A.F.P. received financial support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No. 854248 (TROPIBIO) and from Jesus College Oxford (through R.R.). Collaborations between M.D.P., B.F., E.C.T., and J.D. were supported by a NERC Environmental Sciences Global Partnerships Seedcorn Fund Award (NE/Y003136/1), and J.D. received further funding from the NERC National Capability Science: International Award “Options for Net Zero Plus and Climate Change Adaptation” (NE/X006247/1). M.T.H. was funded by NERC C-CLEAR Research Experience Placement (REP) funding while working on this project
