Cultural and Environmental Predictors of Pre-European Deforestation on Pacific Islands.
Cultural and Environmental Predictors of Pre-European Deforestation on Pacific Islands.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0156340
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发表时间：
2016
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Kushnick G
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Atkinson QD;Coomber T;Passmore S;Greenhill SJ;Kushnick G
太平洋的各种岛屿为研究影响人类对环境影响的因素提供了理想的自然实验。以前对太平洋地区前欧洲森林砍伐的研究表明环境的主要影响，但由于共同的文化祖先和地理邻近性，没有考虑文化差异或控制数据中的依赖性。因此，环境和文化对太平洋森林砍伐和森林替代的相对重要性以及环境影响在多大程度上受到文化渊源的制约仍然没有得到探讨。在这里，我们使用比较系统发育的方法来模拟的影响，9个生态和两个文化变量对欧洲前太平洋森林的结果在80个地点在67个岛屿。我们发现，一些但不是所有的生态功能仍然是重要的预测因子的森林成果后，占文化协变量和非独立的数据。控制生态，农业集约化的文化差异预测森林砍伐和森林替代，有一些证据表明，土地保有权规范预测森林替代。这些研究结果表明，除了生态，文化因素也预测欧洲前太平洋森林的结果。虽然森林的结果与文化的祖先协变，这种影响消失后，控制地理接近和生态。这表明，森林的成果并不受殖民者文化血统的严格限制，而是反映了生态限制和每种文化面对这些限制的短期反应的结合。
The varied islands of the Pacific provide an ideal natural experiment for studying the factors shaping human impact on the environment. Previous research into pre-European deforestation across the Pacific indicated a major effect of environment but did not account for cultural variation or control for dependencies in the data due to shared cultural ancestry and geographic proximity. The relative importance of environment and culture on Pacific deforestation and forest replacement and the extent to which environmental impact is constrained by cultural ancestry therefore remain unexplored. Here we use comparative phylogenetic methods to model the effect of nine ecological and two cultural variables on pre-European Pacific forest outcomes at 80 locations across 67 islands. We show that some but not all ecological features remain important predictors of forest outcomes after accounting for cultural covariates and non-independence in the data. Controlling for ecology, cultural variation in agricultural intensification predicts deforestation and forest replacement, and there is some evidence that land tenure norms predict forest replacement. These findings indicate that, alongside ecology, cultural factors also predict pre-European Pacific forest outcomes. Although forest outcomes covary with cultural ancestry, this effect disappears after controlling for geographic proximity and ecology. This suggests that forest outcomes were not tightly constrained by colonists’ cultural ancestry, but instead reflect a combination of ecological constraints and the short-term responses of each culture in the face of those constraints.