Changing Land Use of Neotropical Montane Forests

Eckerd College, Saint Petersburg FL

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to determine how incorporation into pre-modern empires impacted land-use practices and ecosystems in environmentally fragile regions. The project explores how expansionary states that developed in past societies pursued environmental practices such as resource extraction and agricultural intensification as well as contemporary forces of globalization and industrialization. Did different ideologies or different forms of economic organization produce lighter environmental footprints relative to modern empires and economic forces? The use of a long term perspective offers two advantages. First, it provides comparative case-studies from the past for determining whether sustainable, intensive resource use may be possible in a particular ecosystem. Second, it supports a recent and widespread recognition among ecologists that all modern landscapes on earth are anthropogenic (human-made), even those that are ostensibly “pristine,” and therefore contemporary solutions to mitigate environmental damage must take into account long-term histories of use. The project will build on the research team’s strong existing relations with local communities and regional institutions to develop portable, collaborative modules for sustainable development that address intersecting concerns around cultural heritage, biodiversity, conservation, and local economic well-being. The proposed project will characterize changes in local land use following an upheaval in a tropical montane forest region, an area considered a “global biodiversity hotspot” of exceptional biological richness and ecological vulnerability. Today this region is caught up in broader economic forces as a source of pharmaceutical and other globally marketable plant products, but past societies also exploited its tropical forest resources. This project will evaluate whether incorporation into an expanded economic and political context entailed major social and infrastructural changes, including agricultural expansion and destruction of montane forests, or whether incorporation entailed a laissez-faire approach premised on the selective extraction of forest products via existing, local economic institutions. Research will focus on an urban cluster of interacting villages within a millennial context. The project will evaluate land-use changes in this setting by combining a domestic perspective based on household activities and a landscape perspective based on the spatial organization of people and production infrastructure, particularly agricultural terraces. The project includes an interdisciplinary research team which will address these questions through a variety of complementary analytical methods that include micro- and macro-botanical analysis of preserved plant remains, aerial documentation of agricultural and hydraulic infrastructure, archival study of previous land-use practices, botanical survey of contemporary plant communities, and ethnobotanical interviews documenting traditional plant uses. 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.