Doctoral Dissertation Research: Harvesting Practices, Ecosystem Degradation, and Artifical Selection of Economically Viable Forest Resources

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will focus on the complex interactions between harvesting practices of forest resources and changes in the quality and availability of the resource, which may engender changes to the ways in which the resource is harvested. The project will focus on the impact of destructive harvesting of a fruit-bearing tree by felling the tree, a practice through which the destruction of female fruit-bearing trees from wild stands has led to overall population declines and unbalanced sex ratios. The project will analyze the extent and distribution of the degradation of trees and the ecosystem they occupy, and it will determine whether harvesting practices constitute an artificial selection process that favors economically inferior fruit traits. The project will assess the potential value of new remote sensing techniques for the analysis of land-cover degradation, thereby improving more general capabilities for environmental monitoring. It will provide new insights into the role of harvest-based artificial selection on underutilized crops, which will expand knowledge of this general topic beyond its current focus on fishing and hunting and enhance general understanding of natural resource management, ethnobotany, and historical ecology. Project findings will provide new insights regarding conservation and development in the study area and in many other locales, including those in the U.S., where resource extraction practices are being reconsidered in order to identify economically and environmentally sustainable practices. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. The doctoral student undertaking this project will focus his attention on the harvesting of Mauritia flexuosa (Mauritia palm), which is economically and nutritionally important to residents of the Peruvian Amazon. The study will focus on TWO research questions: (1) What is the extent and distribution of Mauritia palm swamp degradation from unsustainable harvesting? (2) Do these extractive pressures lead to an artificial selection in Mauritia flexuosa? The student hypothesizes that the spatial distribution of resource and ecosystem degradation can be determined by the persistence of declines in the interannual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). As populations decline from overharvesting, a correlating drop in NDVI is expected. Spatial statistics will be used to map hotspots of degradation, and the results will be verified through field surveys. The student also hypothesizes that ecosystem degradation is decreasing the frequency of desirable phenotypes in Mauritia flexuosa. The relationship between the expression of these traits and the level of degradation will be analyzed to ascertain whether destructive harvest practices are shaping phenotypic expression through a process of artificial selection.