Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Sustainability of Miskito Slash-and-Burn Agriculture in the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of the Mosquitia Rain Forest Corridor, Honduras

对世界范围内日益注意环境问题的一个反应是建立一个国际生物圈保护区网络，建立这个网络是为了保护生物和文化高度多样化的地区。管理这些保护区的一项特殊挑战是决定如何保护这些地方的自然生态特征，同时为居住在保护区内和附近的土著人民提供机会，使他们能够从事传统和新形式的可持续经济活动。分析当地资源利用与保护区管理之间的相互关系对于评估这些地方的保护行动的长期可行性至关重要。本博士论文研究将分析土着米斯基托刀耕火种农业在洪都拉斯东部里约热内卢普拉塔诺生物圈保护区提出的保护管理指导方针的背景下的可持续性。该项目将重点关注Wampusirpi的土地利用实践，Wampusirpi是一个沿着保护区东南边界的土著米斯基托社区。为了本项目的目的，可持续性被定义为在当前森林砍伐、人口增长和拟议的生物圈土地使用限制的情况下，保护区农业能够满足村庄生存和现金需求的时间长度。参与者观察和其他民族志研究技术将用于收集社区每个家庭的社会经济、人口统计和农业数据。这些数据将用于构建一个预测模型，模拟该社区未来的人口增长和土地利用扩张，从而促进对生物圈中刀耕火种农业可持续性的评估。该项目将记录目前普拉塔诺里约热内卢米斯基托土著社区的土地使用模式，并将为未来的土地使用实践提供一系列可能的方案，从而确定生物圈居民的生存和经济需求可能对未来保护区管理造成的压力。通过在里约热内卢Platano管理计划的背景下分析农业的可持续性，该项目将有助于当前关于土著人民在保护中的作用以及保护区作为保护生物多样性和提供土著土地和资源权利的模式的可行性的辩论。因此，项目结果将对制定里约热内卢Platano和拉丁美洲其他有人居住保护区的未来保护政策有价值。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

One response to the growing world-wide attention to environmental issues has been the establishment of an international network of biosphere reserves, which have been established to protect areas of high biological and cultural diversity. A special challenge of managing these reserves is determining how to preserve the natural ecological characteristics of places at the same time opportunities are provided for indigenous peoples residing in and near the reserves to engage in traditional and new forms of sustainable economic activity. Analysis of the interrelationships between indigenous resource use and protected-area management is crucial to assessing the long-term viability of conservation initiatives in these locales. This doctoral dissertation research will analyze the sustainability of indigenous Miskito slash-and-burn agriculture within the context of proposed conservation management guidelines for the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve of eastern Honduras. The project will focus on the land-use practices of Wampusirpi, an indigenous Miskito community along the southeastern boundary of the reserve. For the purposes of this project, sustainability is defined as the length of time that agriculture in the reserve will be able to supply village subsistence and cash needs given current forest clearance, population growth, and the proposed biosphere land-use restrictions. Participant observation and other ethnographic research techniques will be used to collect socioeconomic, demographic, and agricultural data from each household in the community. These data will be used to construct a predictive model that simulates future population growth and land-use expansion for the community, thereby facilitating an assessment of the sustainability of slash-and-burn agriculture in the biosphere. The project will document current land-use patterns of an indigenous Miskito community in Rio Platano, and it will provide a range of possible scenarios for future land-use practices, thereby identifying the pressures that subsistence and economic needs of biosphere residents might place on management of the reserve in the future. By analyzing the sustainability of agriculture within the context of the Rio Platano management plan, this project will contribute to current debates on the role of indigenous people in conservation and the viability of protected areas as models to conserve biological diversity and provide for indigenous land and resource rights. Project results therefore will valuable for the formulation of future conservation policy in Rio Platano and other inhabited protected areas in Latin America. 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.