A Spatial-Historical Analysis of Agricultural and Protected Land

Pouchet Jessica, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and supported by SBE's Cultural Anthropology program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Mark Hauser at Northwestern University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist conducting a spatial-historical analysis of agricultural and protected lands. Through an investigation of landscape changes in a biodiversity hotspot over the last 75 years, this research generates knowledge about 1) the emergence and effects of inequalities in areas marked by conservation and 2) the ways people respond to conservation in their decisions about land and forest use. As economic hardship and land shortages worsen, it is likely that human pressures on the forest will increase. The research offers an understanding of the broader trends that make life difficult for both people and the forest, which is knowledge that can improve current U.S. efforts to support conservation and development. In addition, this project involves researchers and undergraduate research assistants from underrepresented groups in STEM. The project maps the phenomenon by which families no longer have enough land to provide for their basic needs through the largely agricultural means available to them. Specifically, it documents the material record using techniques borrowed from survey archaeology, including GPS-based transect walks; aerial photography, and archival research. The project builds on ethnographic findings to map patterns of population density, land tenure, and land use (crop planting) along the borders of the protected area. The project uses these methods to identify the connections among the establishment of protected areas, population growth, decisions about land, and socio-economic inequality. Moreover, this research produces maps that serve as a bridge between insights from ethnography, archival research, rigorous social theory, and the conservation sciences. Human dimensions of natural resource management is a growing subfield in the environmental sciences, and this project fits squarely into that interdisciplinary endeavor. While conservation scientists have recognized the importance of social research for decades, however, attempts to generate knowledge about human-environment relationships that successfully integrate ecological and social understandings continue to encounter hurdles. This project directly works to overcome those hurdles through a synergistic, multidisciplinary collaboration. It offers a holistic understanding of the broader political-ecological trends shaping prosperity of both the people and the protected forest. The project thus advances knowledge on conservation and natural resources by creating avenues for linguistic, sociocultural, archaeological, and ecological collaboration at the theoretical, methodological, and dissemination stages. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.