Beyond forest cover: Land use and biodiversity in rubber trail forests of the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve

Among the strategies to promote sustainable tropical forest development around the world, the Federal Extractive Reserve System of Brazil is widely cited as an exemplary model. It is designed to protect rubber tapper communities, their forests, and their livelihoods while preventing deforestation and conserving biodiversity. In response to changing markets and policies, rubber tappers in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve have recently diversified production to include market agriculture and cattle production, precipitating deforestation in the reserve, with the implication of increased ecological degradation compared to the extraction of nontimber forest products (NTFPs). Our remote sensing and forest inventory analyses yield different insights about the environmental consequences of distinct land-use mixes in two extractive communities, one of which emphasizes cattle and the other, NTFPs. Remote sensing results show a predictably greater impact on forest cover in the cattle-oriented community. This preliminary study is based on nested household- and community-level forest inventory and biodiversity analyses in two communities. Surprisingly, we found higher tree biodiversity in the rubber trail forests of the cattle-oriented community, and significantly lower tree species richness, tree density, total basal area, and number of trees of commercial size in the same land-use unit in the NTFP-focused community. Land-use surveys indicate lower levels of game consumption and hunting in the cattle-oriented community, and strong support for the development of sustainable timber extraction in both communities. The distinct type and degree of forest impact in the two communities exposes the problem of single-impact assessment as the sole means of performance and categorical land-use prohibitions as an effective mode of regulation in conservation areas.Peer reviewedGeograph

Groundwater Governance and the Growth of Center Pivot Irrigation in Cimarron County, OK and Union County, NM: Implications for Community Vulnerability to Drought

Cimarron County, Oklahoma and Union County, New Mexico, neighboring counties in the Southern High Plains, are part of a vital agricultural region in the United States. This region experiences extended periods of cyclical drought threatening its ability to produce, creating an incentive for extensive center pivot irrigation (CPI). Center pivots draw from the rapidly depleting High Plains Aquifer System. As a result, the prospect of long-term sustainability for these agricultural communities is questionable. We use Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems to quantify growth in land irrigated by CPI between the 1950s and 2014, and key informant interviews to explore local perspectives on the causes and impact of such growth. In Cimarron County, OK, CPI increased by the mid-1980s, and has continually increased since. Results suggest adaptation to drought, a depleting aquifer, high corn prices, and less rigid groundwater regulations contribute to CPI growth. Conversely, CPI in Union County, NM, increased until 2010, and then declined. Results also suggest that drought-related agricultural changes and more aggressive well drilling regulations contribute to this decrease. Nevertheless, in both counties, there is a growing concern over the depleting aquifer, the long-term sustainability of CPI, and the region’s economic future

Changing Land Use, Changing Livelihoods: Smallholders Today

This book brings together eleven works by scholars within and beyond geography, to argue the case for a continued engagement with smallholder agricultural studies. The research detailed is largely empirical and draws on a wide spectrum of mixed qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The case studies cover a range of geographic locations, including Brazil, Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Madagascar, Vietnam, and the USA, with greatest emphasis in sub-Saharan Africa. Key themes that emerge include the structural and relative nature of "smallholder" as a category, the dynamic reality of smallholder livelihoods, the importance of smallholder farming and land-use practices to questions of environmental sustainability, and the challenges of vulnerability and adaptation in contemporary human–environment systems. Overall these studies show that smallholder studies are more pertinent than ever, especially in the face of finite resources and global environmental change

Beyond the numbers: Human attitudes and conflict with lions (Panthera leo) in and around Gambella National Park, Ethiopia.

Human-lion conflict is one of the leading threats to lion populations and while livestock loss is a source of conflict, the degree to which livestock depredation is tolerated by people varies between regions and across cultures. Knowledge of local attitudes towards lions and identification of drivers of human-lion conflict can help formulate mitigation measures aimed at promoting coexistence of humans with lions. We assessed locals' attitudes towards lions in and around Gambella National Park and compared the findings with published data from Kafa Biosphere Reserve, both in western Ethiopia. We used household interviews to quantify livestock loss. We found that depredation was relatively low and that disease and theft were the top factors of livestock loss. Remarkably, however, tolerance of lions was lower around Gambella National Park than in Kafa Biosphere Reserve. Multivariate analysis revealed that education level, number of livestock per household, livestock loss due to depredation, and livestock loss due to theft were strong predictors of locals' attitude towards lion population growth and conservation. We show that the amount of livestock depredation alone is not sufficient to understand human-lion conflicts and we highlight the importance of accounting for cultural differences in lion conservation. The low cultural value of lions in the Gambella region corroborate the findings of our study. In combination with growing human population and land-use change pressures, low cultural value poses serious challenges to long-term lion conservation in the Gambella region. We recommend using Arnstein's ladder of participation in conservation education programs to move towards proactive involvement of locals in conservation

Introduction: The Continued Importance of Smallholders Today

Smallholders remain an important part of human-environment research, particularly in cultural and political ecology, peasant and development studies, and increasingly in land system and sustainability science. This introduction to the edited volume explores land use and livelihood issues among smallholders, in several disciplinary and subfield traditions. Specifically, we provide a short history of smallholder livelihood research in the human-environment tradition. We reflect on why, in an age of rapid globalization, smallholder land use and livelihoods still matter, both for land system science and as a reflection of concerns with inequality and poverty. Key themes that emerge from the papers in this volume include the importance of smallholder farming and land-use practices to questions of environmental sustainability, the dynamic reality of smallholder livelihoods, the challenges of vulnerability and adaptation in contemporary human-environment systems, and the structural and relative nature of the term “smallholder.” Overall these contributions show that smallholder studies are more pertinent than ever, especially in the face of global environmental change. Additionally, we argue that questions of smallholder identity, social difference, and teleconnections provide fertile areas of future research. We conclude that we need to re-envision who the smallholder is today and how this translates into modern human-environment smallholder studies

Lessons from the Archives: Understanding Historical Agricultural Change in the Southern Great Plains

In the US, agriculture rapidly expanded beginning in the 1850s, influenced by homesteader policies and new technologies. With increased production also came widespread land-use/land-cover change. We analyze historical agricultural policies and associated land and water use trajectories with a focus on the Southern Great Plains (SGPs). Rapid changes in agriculture and reoccurring drought led to the infamous Dust Bowl, triggering new agricultural and land management policies, with lasting impacts on the landscape. To understand historical agricultural change, we use mixed methods, including archival literature and historical agricultural census data (1910 to 2017) from three counties in a tri-state (Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado) area of the SGPs. Our archival policy and agricultural census analysis illustrates 110 years of agricultural change, showing that agricultural policies and technological advances play an integral role in the development of agroecological systems, especially the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), and the Livestock Forage Disaster Program (LFP). Further, while communities began with distinct agricultural practices, agricultural policy development resulted in increasing uniformity in crop and livestock practices. The results suggest that there are sustainability lessons to be learned by looking to the land and water trajectories and accompanying unintended consequences of the past

A Land Systems Science Framework for Bridging Land System Architecture and Landscape Ecology: A Case Study from the Southern High Plains

Resource-use decisions affect the ecological and human components of the coupled human and natural system (CHANS), but a critique of some frameworks is that they do not address the complexity and tradeoffs within and between the two systems. Land system architecture (LA) was suggested to account for these tradeoffs at multiple levels/scales. LA and landscape ecology (LE) focus on landscape structure (i.e., composition and configuration of land-use and land-cover change [LULCC]) and the processes (social-ecological) resulting from and shaping LULCC. Drawing on mixed-methods research in the Southern Great Plains, we develop a framework that incorporates LA, LE, and governance theory. Public land and water are commons resources threatened by overuse, degradation, and climate change. Resource use is exacerbated by public land and water policies at the state- and local-levels. Our framework provides a foundation for investigating the mechanisms of land systems science (LSS) couplings across multiple levels/scales to understand how and why governance impacts human LULCC decisions (LA) and how those LULCC patterns influence, and are influenced by, the underlying ecological processes (LE). This framework provides a mechanism for investigating the feedbacks between and among the different system components in a CHANS that subsequently impact future human design decisions

A step-wise land-cover classification of the tropical forests of the Southern Yucatán, Mexico

Analysis of land-cover change in the seasonal tropical forests of the Southern Yucatán, Mexico presents a number of significant challenges for the fine-scale land-cover information required of land-change science. Subtle variation in mature forest types across the regional ecocline is compounded by vegetation transitions following agricultural land uses. Such complex mapping environments require innovation in multispectral classification methodologies. This research presents an application of a step-wise maximum likelihood/In-Process Classification Assessment (IPCA) procedure. This hybrid supervised and unsupervised classification methodology allows for exploration of underlying characteristics of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery in tropical environments. Once spectrally separable classes have been identified, field data then determine the ecological definition of vegetation types with special attention paid to areas of unknown or mixed classes. A post-field assessment re-classification using the Dempster-Shafer method reduced the original 25 spectral classes to 14 ecologically distinctive classes, providing the fine-tuned land-cover distinctions that are required for both environmental and socioeconomic research questions. The overall map accuracy was 87% with an average per-class accuracy of 86%. Per-class accuracy ranged from as low as 45% for pasture grass to a high of 100% for tallstature evergreen upland forest, low and medium-stature semi-deciduous upland forest and deciduous forest. © 2011 Taylor & Francis