Changing Land Use of Neotropical Montane Forests

新热带山地森林土地利用的变化

• 批准号: 2019425
• 负责人: Anna Guengerich
• 金额: $ 16.71万
• 依托单位: Eckerd College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-09-01 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2019425&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Changing; Land; Use; Neotropical; Montane

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.

该项目的目标是确定并入前现代帝国如何影响环境脆弱地区的土地使用做法和生态系统。该项目探讨了在过去社会中发展起来的扩张性国家如何追求环境实践，如资源开采和农业集约化，以及当代全球化和工业化的力量。与现代帝国和经济力量相比，不同的意识形态或不同形式的经济组织是否产生了较轻的环境足迹？使用长期视角有两个好处。首先，它提供了过去的比较案例研究，以确定在特定的生态系统中是否可能进行可持续的密集资源利用。其次，它支持了生态学家最近广泛的认识，即地球上所有现代景观都是人为的（人造的），即使是那些表面上“原始”的景观，因此当代减轻环境破坏的解决方案必须考虑长期的使用历史。该项目将建立在研究团队与当地社区和区域机构的强大现有关系的基础上，开发可持续发展的便携式协作模块，解决围绕文化遗产，生物多样性，保护和当地经济福祉的交叉问题。拟议的项目将描述热带山地森林地区发生剧变后当地土地使用的变化，该地区被视为“全球生物多样性热点”，具有异常丰富的生物资源和生态脆弱性。今天，该地区作为制药和其他全球销售的植物产品的来源，被更广泛的经济力量所吸引，但过去的社会也开发了其热带森林资源。该项目将评估纳入扩大的经济和政治背景是否会带来重大的社会和基础设施变化，包括农业扩张和山地森林的破坏，或者是否会带来以通过现有的选择性开采森林产品为前提的自由放任做法，地方经济机构。研究将侧重于千年背景下相互作用的村庄的城市群。该项目将通过结合基于家庭活动的家庭视角和基于人的空间组织和生产基础设施，特别是梯田的景观视角，评估这一背景下的土地使用变化。该项目包括一个跨学科研究小组，将通过各种补充分析方法解决这些问题，包括对保存的植物遗骸进行微观和宏观植物学分析，对农业和水利基础设施进行空中记录，对以前的土地使用做法进行档案研究，对当代植物群落进行植物学调查，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。