Controlled Comparsion of Land Use on a Nigerian Frontier

9318952 Stone该项目支持几位人类学家的历史生态研究，研究两个农民如何开发尼日利亚以前未开垦的土地。该项目将利用远程卫星图像记录土地利用、地图、人口普查和详细的农户农业劳动投入的民族志研究方面的变化，比较两个群体不同文化的土地开发模式的不同历史影响。要提出的具体问题包括分析两个群体在加强生产和通过土地枯竭而放弃不同地区的倾向方面的差异。这项研究很重要，因为土地退化是世界上许多地区的一个严重问题，而解决这些问题的办法不仅仅是技术上的。我们必须了解当地人们如何利用土地的模式，以便理解为什么一些群体维护和保护土地资源，而另一些群体耗尽土地资源。这种深入的比较将为传统民族如何利用他们的农业土地提供新的思路。＊＊＊

9318952 Stone This project supports the historical ecological research of several anthropologists studying how two peasant farming populations exploited a previously unsettled land area of Nigeria. Using images from remote satellites to document changes in land use, maps, censuses, and detailed ethnographic studies of labor inputs to farming by peasant households, the project will compare the different historical effects of culturally distinctive patterns of land exploitation by two groups. Specific questions to be asked include analyzing the differences between the two groups in their propensity to intensify production and to abandon through land exhaustion different areas. This research is important because land degradation is a critical problem in many areas of the world, and the solutions to the problems are not simply technological. We must understand local models of how people use land in order to understand why some groups maintain and conserve land resources and others exhaust them. This sort of intensive comparison will provide new ideas on how traditional peoples exploit their agricultural land. ***