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

对全世界对环境问题日益关注的一种回应是建立了生物圈保护区国际网络，该网络的建立是为了保护高度生物和文化多样性的地区。管理这些保护区的一个特殊挑战是确定如何在保留地方自然生态特征的同时，为居住在保护区内和附近的土著人民提供从事传统形式和新形式的可持续经济活动的机会。分析土著资源利用与保护区管理之间的相互关系，对于评估这些地区保护倡议的长期可行性至关重要。这项博士论文研究将在洪都拉斯东部的里奥普拉塔诺生物圈保护区拟议的保护管理指南的背景下，分析土著米斯基托刀耕火种农业的可持续性。该项目将侧重于Wampusirpi的土地使用做法，Wampusirpi是保护区东南边界沿线的一个土著米斯基托社区。就本项目而言，可持续性的定义是，考虑到当前的森林砍伐、人口增长和拟议的生物圈土地使用限制，保护区内的农业能够满足村庄生存和现金需求的时间长度。参与者观察和其他人种学研究技术将被用来收集社区中每个家庭的社会经济、人口和农业数据。这些数据将被用来构建一个预测模型，模拟社区未来的人口增长和土地使用扩展，从而促进对生物圈内刀耕火种农业的可持续性的评估。该项目将记录里约·普拉塔诺一个土著米斯基托社区目前的土地使用模式，并将为未来的土地使用做法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未来可能给保护区的管理带来的压力。通过在里约热内卢普拉塔诺管理计划范围内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养护方面的作用以及保护区作为养护生物多样性和保障土著土地和资源权利的样板的可行性的辩论。因此，项目成果将对未来制定里约热内卢普拉塔诺和拉丁美洲其他有人居住的保护区的保护政策很有价值。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.