Changing Land Use of Neotropical Montane Forests

该项目的目标是确定融入前现代帝国如何影响环境脆弱地区的土地利用实践和生态系统。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更轻的环境足迹？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，以确定在特定生态系统中是否可能实现可持续的集约资源利用。其次，它支持了生态学家最近广泛认识到的一个观点，即地球上所有现代景观都是人为造成的，即使是那些表面上“原始”的景观，因此减轻环境破坏的当代解决方案必须考虑到长期的使用历史。该项目将以研究团队与当地社区和区域机构的牢固关系为基础，开发可移动的协作模块，以促进可持续发展，解决文化遗产、生物多样性、保护和当地经济福祉等交叉问题。拟议的项目将描述在热带山地森林地区发生剧变后当地土地利用的变化，该地区被认为是“全球生物多样性热点”，具有异常丰富的生物多样性和生态脆弱性。今天，该地区作为药品和其他全球可销售的植物产品的来源，参与了更广泛的经济力量，但过去的社会也开发了其热带森林资源。这个项目将评价将森林纳入扩大的经济和政治范围是否会导致重大的社会和基础设施变化，包括农业的扩大和山地森林的破坏，或者将森林纳入其中是否会导致一种以通过现有的当地经济机构有选择地开采森林产品为前提的自由放任的做法。研究将集中在千年背景下相互作用的村庄城市集群。该项目将通过结合以家庭活动为基础的家庭观点和以人的空间组织和生产基础设施，特别是农业梯田为基础的景观观点来评价这种情况下的土地利用变化。该项目包括一个跨学科研究小组，该小组将通过各种互补的分析方法来解决这些问题，这些分析方法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，对以前的土地利用做法进行档案研究，对当代植物群落进行植物学调查，以及对记录传统植物用途的民族植物学访谈。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

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.