Jane Southworth, PhD - US grants

Protected parks remain the main mode of purposeful biodiversity conservation in most of the world. Surrounding these parks particularly in developing countries, are landscapes that usually still contain considerable biodiversity but also have rapidly growing human populations. These are areas of dynamic change in demography, land use, and land cover, and they are characterized by biological and socio-political risks not usually found elsewhere. This collaborative research project will examine the interactions among land use, land cover, peoples' livelihoods, and biodiversity in landscapes surrounding national parks in Tanzania and Uganda. While these landscapes remain important habitats for biodiversity, they are also zones of dynamic demographic and land use change, often with considerable agricultural expansion and intensification. Little scientific research has explored the spatial and temporal interactions among land use, livelihood change, and biodiversity in these landscapes. Two complementary research questions are the focus of the project: (1) How does the presence of a park affect agricultural land use and other livelihood strategies surrounding the park? (2) How do the extent, character and intensity of agriculture affect biodiversity outside the park, measured by the distribution of key indicator plant and animal taxa? Two overarching propositions relate to these: (a) the presence of a park will stimulate processes that lead to islandization of the park; and (b) the relationship between biodiversity and agriculture in the landscape surrounding a park is neither dichotomous nor linear, but will be positive under certain land use conditions and negative under others. The exploration and verification of these models would have important scientific and policy implications.

This is a comparative study at two contrasting sites -- one in western Uganda and one in northern Tanzania. It is interdisciplinary, utilizing social and biodiversity surveys, ethnographic tools, and analysis of satellite imagery. The intellectual merit of this project lies in an enhanced understanding of population-environment relations and land-use and land-cover change as these are influenced by proximity to protected areas, relationships about which little is known but which are increasingly important. These issues crosscut concerns in geography, anthropology, ecology, and conservation biology.

New roads bring complex changes to regions, including ecological degradation, social conflict, and economic development. "Road ecology" emerged to study transport systems and ecology, but more attention is needed on the role of humans as agents of environmental change, with a focus on livelihood decisions and resource use. People do not simply respond to new infrastructure. They also produce ecological and institutional changes that in turn generate feedback effects that affect human well being. In this interdisciplinary research project, the investigators will use a complex systems framework to focus on social-ecological systems as integrated wholes via the interface of infrastructure and land tenure institutions. They will draw on the concept of resilience, a property of complex systems, and reformulate it in terms of system components, relationships, innovations, and continuity, which afford a means of observing system properties relevant to the retention or loss of system identity. They also will expand on the concept of connectivity to consider its importance not only as infrastructure linkages that bring external shocks from outside regions but also as networks of connections among local actors and processes. These ideas motivate specific expectations about connectivity and resilience, both at the scale of a social-ecological system and for specific components within a system. The investigators will examine the impacts of road connectivity changes on social-ecological resilience in a global biodiversity hotspot, the tri-national MAP region of the southwestern Amazon where Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru meet. The project will draw on considerable data already in hand for the study site while adding new data to capture changes underway after recent infrastructure upgrades on the Brazilian side. The investigators will spatially integrate state data and cartographic products, cadastral maps, satellite imagery, social surveys, and vegetation transects using GPS and GIS, thereby allowing identification of social actors, institutions, and habitat patches as system components in geographic space. The investigators also will specify the relationships among those components via their local connections, which allow monitoring of changes in those networks over time and facilitate spatial analysis of temporal dynamics, particularly feedback effects to livelihoods and well being. The analysis will be comparative, because infrastructure connectivity is higher on the Brazilian side than the others, allowing for a natural experiment in the same region. The investigators will develop a dynamic simulation model, incorporating input from stakeholders about possible future scenarios to extend the simulations beyond the project life.

This project will improve the design of integrated databases for interdisciplinary environmental research, facilitate empirical evaluation of complex systems theory, and result in more robust frameworks for understanding human agency and environmental change. It will build on an institutional agreement between the University of Florida and the Federal University of Acre and provide opportunities for students in both institutions to conduct field research and participate in data analysis and publications. Because local stakeholders in the tri-national MAP region of the southwestern Amazon have called for more scientific input and data products concerning social and ecological impacts of roads, the investigators will make data products available to regional schools and universities communities, and decision makers. Results from this project therefore should facilitate more informed planning about new infrastructure in order to capture economic benefits, manage social conflicts, and avoid ecological degradation. An award resulting from the FY 2005 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.

Tens of millions of hectares of land has changed hands in the last decade in a large number of lower-income countries, with the UK, China, and the US being among the largest sources of land investments. Control over land enables investors to cultivate new commodity crops, deploy new agricultural practices and technologies, and sell output for new uses and in new markets - with associated impacts on food-energy security, human well-being, and ecological processes. The scale and pace of changes in land ownership and access has increased rapidly in lower-income tropical countries. The project will assess outcomes of land transactions in Ethiopia - a country that has witnessed thousands of transactions and has substantial external investment, including from the United States - to identify when land transactions generate positive versus negative outcomes. This research will focus in particular on agricultural, ecological, and food and energy security outcomes. The project will generate new data that will be available for public use by other scholars and researchers, train scientists in the United States and build greater research capacity among international collaborators, and produce findings that will hold practical interest for decision makers in government agencies, NGOs, and donor organizations. Generalizable propositions about the impacts of land tenure changes on farm level processes, producer incentives, and labor practices will be of interest to US investors in other regions.

The project will focus in particular on quantifying the nature and extent of socioeconomic, land cover/change and ecological impacts, and modeling the causal sequences and feedback loops of land transactions. The research will advance the conceptual understanding of how tenure and institutional changes on land drive human-nature interactions and impacts in coupled agro-ecological systems. The project will aggregate and leverage existing socioeconomic datasets, and collect original social and ecological data from eight transaction sites. The research will contribute in three major ways towards an improved understanding of the effects of land transactions and the social and ecological effects of land tenure changes. It will: (1) Develop new theoretical insights into the livelihood, land use, and ecological effects of land tenure changes and displacement through integration, quantitative analyses, and agent based modeling based on multi-level social, economic, ecological, and biophysical data; (2) Enhance existing methods to understand and detect changes in land cover using remote sensing data for both agricultural and forest landscapes, particularly for the drier eastern African region; and (3) Improve statistical analysis and computer simulations-based predictions, in particular by developing better spatial analysis techniques. Overall, the project will show how varying patterns of livelihood and land cover changes result from land transition pathways associated with land transactions.