CIPEC - 2002 Summer Institute Abstracts

The Moskitia is a remote forested and, in comparison to Central American standards, sparsely populated area in northern Honduras, bordering Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea. In the center of this zone, the Honduran government created the Biosphere Reservation Rio Platano in an attempt to build, together with other international interest groups, a biological corridor in Meso America in order to protect the last neotropical forests and maintain the existing level of biodiversity. Human migration into the area and the growing local population exert increasing pressure on the natural resources - a situation that is exacerbated by the practical absence of state institutions. An existing computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS) establishes the national interests. Local interests, however, are regulated by informal property rights arrangements. This research project attempts to visualize local institutional arrangements with GIS tools. Questions arise as to the extent that adding to the established GIS will create or expand existing information asymmetries.
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In 1998 I listened to a friend tell the story of the creation of her people, the Wounaan. "The creator began to carve us of cocobolo, but," she continued, "as he was carving, his hand slipped on the hard wood and he cut himself. He began to mold people of clay instead." Though this is a traditional account of the creation of the Wounaan people, it also reflects a contemporary response to social and economic forces. Earlier collections of the Wounaan creation myth do not refer to cocobolo (Dalbergia retusa), and the modification of this myth may be an indication of the increasing economic importance of cocobolo as a medium for commercial carvings. The initiation of a commercial carving industry among the Wounaan roughly coincides with a period of intense landscape and socioeconomic changes in the region of eastern Panamá the Wounaan inhabit: village formation, the extension of the Pan American Highway, and the creation of Darién National Park. The alteration of the Wounaan creation myth therefore illustrates recent environmental and cultural changes that are the topic of my dissertation research.

I propose to study the historical ecology of Wounaan forest use in eastern Panamá. My principle goal is to investigate changes in Wounaan use and management of forests in eastern Panamá, and the social, environmental, and economic forces that have driven these changes. I am particularly interested in whether small-scale forest management can be evidenced by forest succession trajectories. As long-term residents in the region and as the primary users of a wide range of forest resources, an assessment of forest management and likely future forest condition cannot be complete without an understanding of Wounaan management. In order to address this goal, I have identified four research objectives that I will study in their present and historical contexts. I will describe Wounaan cosmology and forest management, and their effects on forest use and succession; describe the role of artesanal non-timber forest products, e.g. chunga palm fibers, cocobolo wood, and tagua palm seeds, in forest use and management; assess the roles of different institutional actors, e.g. indigenous leadership, non-governmental organizations, and governmental organizations, in forest use and management; and assess the distribution of vegetation types across the landscape and whether the imprint of local forest use and management is reflected remotely sensed imagery. I will carry out this research in 2002 and May - August of 2003 in two artesanal Wounaan villages of eastern Panama, Majé and Puerto Lara. I have established my research plans in an agreement with the National Congress of Wounaan People and the Foundation for the Development of Wounaan People. Because the historical ecology approach uses both ethnographic and ecological data, I will employ various methods in order to gather data. My principal methods of research are literature and archival review, participant observation, participatory rural appraisal, semi-structured interviews, vegetation sampling, and analysis of aerial photos and satellite images. These results will in turn provide critically needed information for the evaluation of land use, conservation, and development strategies in lowland tropical forests of eastern Panama and the larger Neotropical region, as well as develop significant cultural archival resources for the Wounaan people.
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Experience has shown that institutions of collective action and property rights play an important role in how people use natural resources, which in turn shapes the outcomes of production systems. This System-wide Program examines the formation and effectiveness of voluntary, community-level organizations and property institutions as they relate to natural resource management. The Program stresses comparative research that yields international public goods. The conceptual framework to assess the linkages among property rights, collective action, and natural resource management is based on the spatial and temporal dimensions embodied by different practices and technologies and deals explicitly with the effect of differences in the biophysical and socioeconomic environment. At the same time CAPRi recognizes the value of comparisons that cut across countries, ecoregions, and resources. An understanding of the factors that facilitate effective local organizations and appropriate property regimes in one resource sector can be valuable for developing policies for another resource.
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In the course of 19th and 20th centuries, the Czech Republic territory was exposed to the action of many historical changes and events. The processes and events such as the agricultural, industrial and scientific-technical revolution, development of capitalism, two World Wars, expansion and last fall of the communist system, exerted principal effects on forming and using the space and the landscape. This presents a wide opportunity for studying the development of the society-nature interaction. Moreover there is an advantage that for Czech territory, rich data sources are available for the period 1845 to 2000.

Three model cadastral areas, characterized by different natural conditions and economical-geographic situation were chosen. Cadastre Horní Rokytnice nad Jizerou (550-970 m a.s.l.) in Giant Mountains belongs to a forest and forest-meadows type of the landscape. Recreation activities are of a great importance here. Cadaster - Chotec belongs to the agricultural field landscape (99%) in a flat relief of Labe Lowlands (230 m a.s.l.). Fertile soils are prevalent here. Similar natural conditions are in cadastre Zápy what is situated in the Prague hinterland. Zápy is considerably affected by the vicinity of the capital city - commercial activities, industrial plants, superhighway.

The land use and landscape structure development were evaluated based on real property data, stable cadastre maps (about 1845) in their comparison with actual cadastral maps (first half of the 1990´s, scale of 1 : 2 880), aerial photos (periods prior to and after the agricultural land collectivisation). For the estimation of the anthropogenic effect on the landscape, the coefficient of the measure of the anthropogenic influence of the landscape (CAI) was defined as a ratio between areas with a considerable intensity of use and areas with a lower intensity of use. The maps were evaluated using spatial overlay analyses in GIS ArcView 3.2 environment and coefficients describing landscape elements (matrix and patches).

The results indicate that the Czech cultural landscape has been intensively agriculturally used as soon as in the half of the last century. Its fine mosaic had a regular geometric structure. With changing methods of management after 1948 (socialist system) negative changes of the landscape structure were encountered (ploughing of roads, straightening of water streams, increasing of the average arable land plot area). The current Czech landscape is characterized by a rough network of large agricultural fields. The share of the most anthropogenetically transformed areas in the whole period increased (Zápy by a factor of almost 5 - especially roads development). The high intensity of the agricultural use of the land and adverse structure of the landscape resulted in a general deterioration of the landscape conditions between 1948 and 1990. In certain areas, due to specific driving forces (decrease of the population density after the displacement of Sudeten Germans) or also natural conditions, the negative impacts of the large-capacity methods of the management were, however, inhibited (ecologically favourable categories of land use - permanent grass and forest areas increased, development of green areas - Horní Rokytnice n. J.). These tendencies are strengthened after 1990 (state subsidy politics, changes of the ownership, economic reasons). This, however, does not occur in productionally favourable areas. Our analysis obviously indicates a tight connection between the social-economic development and development of the landscape. It was demonstrated that the land use/cover and landscape structure can be used for monitoring on the landscape level and are of great help in landscape management.
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The Maya Biosphere Reserve in the Petén, northern Guatemala, is the largest contiguous lowland forest remaining in Central America. It serves as the heart of the Maya Forest by connecting protected areas in Mexico with those in Belize. Since its inception in 1990, the Reserve has been subject to increasing pressures from the surrounding human populations. The greatest direct threat is deforestation, driven in part by activities of the local communities such as agricultural expansion, cattle ranching, and hunting, and in part by activities from outside populations such as petroleum extraction, large scale cattle ranching and timber harvesting. Years of heavy migration to the Petén and unplanned settlements means that land has become scarce and the Maya Biosphere Reserve is now one of the only remaining forested areas in the region. While settlement is allowed within the Buffer Zone of the Reserve, it is more restricted in the Multiple Use Zone, and prohibited in the Core Zones. Yet, as there are few markers indicating the boundaries of the Reserve, it is not surprising that people settle in all three of the Zones. The result is that management agencies of the Reserve are aiming to achieve conservation goals in heavily populated areas. Increasing land security is one of the primary ways that they aim to achieve these goals, as it theoretically encourages resource behavior conducive to conservation. While the use of land security as a conservation tool is common, it is based largely on assumptions of how it affects behavior. My current research aims to examine how resource use and economic decisions are made at the household level by exploring those assumptions. This research is part of a larger study that examines how different conservation strategies in and around protected areas affect local communities.
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In Mexico, there is a long tradition of community management of forests through ejidos (village-owned lands); about 80% of all forest in Mexico lies within ejidos. In addition, the forest ejido in Mexico is a key socio-cultural system and an important component of the productive chain in the forestry sector. However, even though the ejidos are the owner lands, they have not obtained important benefits based on sustainable development criteria. Therefore, community forestry is an important action toward a sustainable forestry development in the future.

In order to get advance in this way, and considering that forest ejidos and communities are who live with the immediate consequences of any action carried out in their communities, they must be involved in the decision making process, based on a participatory democracy principle, for designing, implementing and evaluating strategic plans, programs and specific projects related with sustainable forestry development with a holistic vision.
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One of the main themes that dominated the literature on land tenure in Mexico during the 20th century was the impact of agrarian reform breaking up the large rural estates and distributing grants of land called ejidos to peasant communities. Research concerns also focused on the relative productivity of the ejidal sector compared to the private sector, and in the past decade, changes occurring as a result of the end of the agrarian reform program and the program of providing titles of ejido parcels to individual peasant producers. Often the private and ejidal sector have been characterized as diametrically opposed, the former being highly productive and commercially oriented while the latter is stagnant and unproductive. However, according to Ibarra and Morales (cited in Berlanga, 2000:81) "the majority of the private property owners are in a social and economic situation as unfavorable or more so than holders of ejidal or communal grants".

This study is focused on a small rural community in the northeastern portion of the state of Guanajuato. Most of the inhabitants had remained on the land as sharecroppers of rainfed maize and beans despite the development of numerous ejidos throughout the township where it is located. In the late 1970s, the resurgence of agitation for ejido grants in the township by landless peasants due to mounting demographic pressures motivated the landowners (all members of the same family) to sell the land to these sharecroppers. While this process fragmented the land structure, it effectively reinforced the private property sector since small holdings could not be expropriated. Today, most of these new landowners maintain a land use pattern of maize and bean production for their own consumption needs, in some cases complemented by the cultivation of wheat and barley, on small plots of 3 or 4 hectares. In addition to agricultural production, most of the adult males of this community are involved in temporary international migration.

Patterns of land tenure and land use are the result of a variety of interrelated social, economic, political and ecological processes. Research centers on two main issues: 1) the formation of the land tenure regime of a community of small private property holders illustrating how land tenure legislation prior to 1992 was instrumental in forming the private sector as well as the ejidal sector; and 2) the cultural and ecological constraints faced by these small scale farmers to intensify agricultural production despite having good quality alluvial soils and a continual flow of remittances. To accomplish this purpose, it is necessary to look at a variety of factors including the characteristics of the physical environment, institutions, government policies, political and economic contexts, population dynamics, changing consumption patterns, as well as individual household economic strategies.
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With over eighty-eight percent of Indiana's forests in private ownership, it is essential to gain a better understanding of how decisions are made that affect the sustainability of this socially, economically, and environmentally vital resource. This study proposes to use a social psychological framework to characterize landowners according to their attitudes, social and cultural norms, and intentions in the context of natural resource management in the Upper Wabash River Basin. The proposed methodology includes examining larger landscape scale social processes by using census data and mapping these characteristics across the Basin. In addition, land owner attitudes, social and cultural norms, and intentions will be gauged through a telephone survey of a random sample of landowners. This information will used to predict land use /land cover change in the watershed through spatial representation and analysis in an integrated GIS model.
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People living in the eastern mountains arrived there in many different ways, but once they settled, most remained relatively distant from the market economy, producing crops to maintain a subsistence for themselves and their families, and generating only enough cash to purchase necessities. These mountaineers were "discovered" by local-color writers in the late nineteenth century, and their lives were the subject of much speculation and romanticization for several decades. Agricultural depression in the twenties attracted the more sustained empirical attention of agricultural economists and rural sociologists to these mountain farmers, leading to numerous prescriptions for improving rural life. Proposals for the Appalachian Mountains included moving farmers off their hardscrabble farms and converting these areas to recreation and forest areas for the public use. These planners hoped that the reform of ecologically and socially destructive habits would take place simultaneously, and thus both the nature and the people would be improved.

The expansion of the national parks and forests meant that some of the recreational goals were achieved during the twenties, but with Roosevelt's inauguration agricultural reform was quickly integrated into relief and recovery programs. I employ case studies from Vermont and Virginia to demonstrate variations in how federal programs were implemented, which provide an insight into local responses to conservation, agricultural reform, and later, the projects of the New Deal. The receptiveness of policymakers in Virginia and Vermont to federal oversight determined the future of both their farms and their forests: the creation of Virginia's Shenandoah National Park was facilitated by federal collaboration and ultimately, the forced removal of mountain agriculturalists, while Vermonters rejected similar resettlement programs, favoring voluntary additions to the National Forest over the federal oversight of land conversion programs.

The transition from subsistence farming to managed reforestation meant that mountain culture in targeted areas was forever altered. Though contemporary sources describe the mountain way of life, little has been done to analyze its long-term sustainability. My project will ultimately go deeper, using forest cover data, soil maps, and aerial photographs to determine the destructiveness or viability of subsistence way of life. Furthermore, I seek to explore how economic and political decisions that led to the expansion of the national park and forest system changed larger patterns of land use in the East, and how federal intervention revised the meaning of life in the mountains.
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This paper explores children's work in western Canada using a public use sample of the 1901 national census. It examines differences in age distribution, life-cycle service, wage earning, household composition, the age at leaving home and school attendance among immigrant children. Jon Gjerde has argued that immigrant households placed higher expectations on their offspring, drafting their labor in support of household economies, and there is some resonance for Gjerde's overarching dichotomy between corporate European and American ideas of family here. But Gjerde's theorized dichotomy does not extend smoothly to evidence drawn from one of North America's last major agricultural frontiers. In the Canadian Prairies, Scandinavian youth continued to participate in life-cycle service, earning wages away from home to support parental households during the settlement era. But East European youth, whatever shape traditional family had taken in their parents' homelands, were instead far more likely to form independent households than to earn wages to support of their parent farms.
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The Arctic Borderlands Ecological Knowledge Coop (ABC) recently completed it's sixth year of ecological monitoring in the region of the Porcupine Caribou Herd range: Northern Yukon and Northwest Territories (Canada) and Alaska (USA). Community members are trained to interview local experts, men and women who spend time on the land and are keen observers. Interviews focus on indicators of three areas of environmental concern: development, contaminants, and climate change. Questions cover weather, berries, fish, caribou, and other animals. Results of the monitoring are shared in an annual gathering of community representatives. Concerns and arising research questions are handed over to agency members of the coop for further scientific investigation. An interactive website posts some survey results along with data from complementary scientific monitoring projects.
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A study of land use and ownership rights of Aymara Indian communities in the Bolivian Altiplano show that land-tenure systems reflect a historic concept of sharing risk by distributing land across an environmental gradient. Biophysical factors in the landscape (e.g. soils, hydrology, and microclimate) vary greatly, making agricultural potential highly variable depending on the location of a farmer's individual plot. Following the Bolivian Agrarian Reform of 1953, Aymara communities formalized preexistent patterns of land ownership and land use, mapping the zones of grazing lands and clusters of farm plots throughout the community according to the agricultural potential (and risks) of the land. Each household maintained rights, either through title or usufruct, to land in each zone. While the amount of land each family owned may have varied according to their status, all households, despite their status, shared in the potential benefits as well as the risks of farming. By this method, no one family was granted exclusive access to the richest or the poorest farming and grazing lands. Anthropologists and historians who have studied Andean, and Bolivian, farming systems noted that pre-conquest patterns of land use and land tenure also optimized agricultural potential by exploiting the vertical ecological gradient and defining a range of land use rights. Thus modern land use and tenure systems in the Lake Titicaca region reflect a historic understanding of environmental variability and the importance of flexibility in determining land ownership and use.
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If we talk about Conservation Science, during the past 5 years there has been a great change in the tools we use for this purpose. We used to quantify the biodiversity, based on fieldwork in the areas. With some previous information about it, now we can have all the information we need and more, thanks to the GIS and Remote Sensing, we can also find out different places where we can do our work, and how to get there, also to see the vegetation units where the study is suppose to be.

One of the newest projects that is going on right now is the Quantification of the Biodiversity on the Gurayos TCO (Tierras Comunitarias de Origen), we are going to be able to learn and share knowledge. We will make some defragmentation studies in two agricultural areas of the Urubichá Community, we will be able to see how they use their land, and be able to compare between two different land use conducts, in order to tell then how they can manage their land and all the possible products they can grow on it. Along with the TCO project, we will do a map of wetlands of Bolivia, using radar images; right now we are developing a method to classify wetlands with radar.

Vilcabamba-Amboro is a conservation megacorridor, that involves two South American countries-Bolivia and Peru-integrating protected areas of both countries. The generation of new information about this area in the Tropical Andes, involves a vegetation map, DEM, and a soil map with Modis Images. Also, we are planning to make a Soil Map of the Amazon Basin. You will wonder how are going to pull this off? Well, we have all data from the Calicatas, and the GPS points of every one of them.

In Bolivia there are different types of colons, also different types of human-forest interaction, in order to be able to tell how different is the interaction, we are going to study three different sites. For this study we are planning to use the Bolivian deforestation maps of the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s and of the Landsat Path Finder Deforestation Project, observing and defragmenting the forest in the three sites:

Land use in the Chiquitania has changed so dramatically and in so many different ways that the concern for this has been expressed in many different studies. One of these studies is my Analysis of the Deforestation in the Central Chiquitania Using Satellite Images, done in 2001, to study deforestation in the area from 1986 to 1998. The results reveled alarming deforestation rates: 0.08% ha/year during the period of 1986-1991, 0.19% ha/year from 1992 to 1996, and 0.45% ha/year from 1996 to 1998. With these alarming figures in an area of 2,168,753.10 ha, all the organization working close or in the Chiquitania, where the Museum, Conservation International, Woods Hole, and IPAMA, are directing the Amazonian Scenarios, have the following objectives in their research: (1) identify the macro-drivers of Amazon land use change; (2) model and simulate forest fire, logging, deforestation, and their interactions; (3) estimate effects on carbon emissions, hydrology and Amazon economy; and (4) assess biodiversity threats and losses due to land use changes.
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Complementarity between conservation and productivity objectives makes watershed development attractive in semi-arid areas. However, a potential tradeoff with poverty alleviation arises because watershed development may benefit landholders while harming landless people, particularly herders and women. India has a history of highly innovative watershed projects in which downstream landholders share benefits by compensating landless people upstream for providing an environmental service. Most current projects, however, take alternative measures that ignore the issue of environmental services. Evidence from 70 villages in Maharashtra suggests the presence of poverty alleviation tradeoffs, highlighting the potential value of more explicitly addressing compensation for environmental services.
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Recently there has been a strong tendency to assume a 'natural' congruence between democratic decision procedures and sound substantive environmental policy outcomes. Democracy and enhanced environmental protection have been taken to be mutually reinforcing, a perspective which is particularly marked in the emphasis on 'participation' to be found in the literature emerging from international development agencies. The recent focus on community based conservation has further reinforced this trend towards decentralized governance. This research seeks to examine the viability of participatory environmental policies within the context of developing societies. The contention here is that given the existence of multicultural groups, stringent social stratification systems, and a large proportion of rural population, participatory natural resource policies may perhaps prove to be detrimental to the marginalized groups in society, prominent among them being rural women. By analyzing the implications of such participatory environmental policies for rural women in the context of a community forestry program called Joint Forest Management in India, this research tries to unravel the relationship between participation, equity and sustainability, arguing that the association between the three variables is not a simple straightforward linear one, but one that is conditioned by several contextual and structural factors. So while the recent emphasis on participation in environmental policymaking is a step in the right direction, the inter-linkages between notions of community participation and environmental conservation are much more complex than some advocates of community conservation would like to believe. On a theoretical level, this research seeks to comprehend the challenges to environmental democracy and the possibilities for strengthening it.
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Studies in resource management often ignore cultural differences in how individuals model the environment and how much and what individuals know about the environment. This led to mechanical models based on institutions and rational choice approaches. While these approaches are able to explain a good deal they ignore some important differences. These differences are important with respect to the effects of migration and globalization effects on different generations. I will describe several findings from research in Guatemala, Mexico and the US.

The studies presented include research with adults and children in different cultures. The data illustrate several points:

Due their nature, adequate Common Pool Resources (CPR) management requires the sustained cooperation of users for avoiding under provision and over appropriation outcomes. CPR governance problems and their institutional solutions have crucial implications for local livelihoods and global environmental change. Game Theory -mostly conventional game theory- has been broadly used for understanding governance problems present in CPR management. As a branch of mathematics, game theory -both the conventional as well as the evolutionary one- have very useful applications for understanding strategic interactions amongst CPR users or appropriators and for identifying key variables that might shape relevant incentives to avoid the under provision and over appropriation of these resources. Yet, both conventional and evolutionary Game Theory have limitations in their broad applicability for explaining and predicting CPR management outcomes. The presentation will briefly illustrate some of their practical uses and limitations.
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Despite the central importance of colonist populations in the transformation of the Amazon frontier, we know little about the relationship between these immigrant farmers and the forests in which they live. The majority of studies about forest knowledge have mostly focused on indigenous people, and more recently on rubber tapers as the only true holders of this kind knowledge. Moreover, most studies of the Amazon frontier are empirical measurements of the rate of forest clearing and burning for agriculture and pasture formation that ignore the knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of frontier actors that influence their uses and management of forests. I am analyzing the evolving relationship between these farmers and their forests, including: (1) their acquisition of knowledge of forest uses and its ecology, (2) the relationship between this knowledge and their land-use practices, (3) the emerging environmental consciousness among colonist farmer organizations in Amazônia, and (4) the broader role of these organizations in shaping new approaches to rural development.

Preliminary field research found that some farmers have acquired knowledge about plant species as indicators of soils types, forest plant uses, and ecological services associated with the maintenance of the forest. Subsequent research will attempt to identify the attributes of colonists that are associated with forest conservation on their properties. Although historically portrayed as "villains of the forest" the colonist farmers of the Transamazon Highway have developed two innovative proposals that reconcile rural development and forest conservation. One proposal is a regional land use plan. The second is the establishment of a "green" credit line that provides incentives for farmers' investments in forest recuperation and conservation. These initiatives demonstrate that the characterization of colonists' farmers as static forest "villains" misses their dynamic role as potential partners for rethinking new avenues for forest conservation.
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During the last few decades East Kalimantan has been under an enormous pressure for forest conversion. Large-scale projects and smallholders operate simultaneously on a diffused landscape and contribute to the rapid loss of forest in the area. This study attempts to model the deforestation process in the region from two different levels.

At the village level, the spatial regression is used to observe causalities and to predict the quantity of deforestation rate. Spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity are taken care of. At the pixel level, a combination of Markov transition probability matrix, Decision Support System and Cellular Automata is implemented to produce a prediction of most likely location of deforestation.

Spatial Lag model with the best fit reveals that immediate causes of deforestation such as proximity to market and large-scale projects from settlement are not significant, suggesting that local people contribution to deforestation rate is negligible. Very weak explanatory power of population is another evident of such. Road density gives the single strongest explanation, followed by spatial lag of deforestation rate. Percentages of areas in the village occupied by mine, estate crops and industrial timber plantation contribute to deforestation rate in positive ways. Spatial ANOVA suggests that a single regression model is sufficient to cover the region; sub-district and district do not contribute to a further heterogeneity.

The combined approach at the pixel level incorporates proximities to transportation network, each large-scale project, settlements and markets. Fuzzy membership functions to assign deforestation risk to each of the proximity are chosen based on expert knowledge. The weighting scheme associated to these factors again relies on expert knowledge. The results map of most likely deforested areas conveys convincingly that the model is not too far off. Validation has not been done due to data limitation.
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Last Updated: April 04, 2004
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2002 Summer Institute Participant Abstracts

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