The application of light detection and ranging (LiDAR), a laser-based remote-sensing technology that is capable of penetrating overlying vegetation and forest canopies, is generating a fundamental ...shift in Mesoamerican archaeology and has the potential to transform research in forested areas world-wide. Much as radiocarbon dating that half a century ago moved archaeology forward by grounding archaeological remains in time, LiDAR is proving to be a catalyst for an improved spatial understanding of the past. With LiDAR, ancient societies can be contextualized within a fully defined landscape. Interpretations about the scale and organization of densely forested sites no longer are constrained by sample size, as they were when mapping required laborious on-ground survey. The ability to articulate ancient landscapes fully permits a better understanding of the complexity of ancient Mesoamerican urbanism and also aids in modern conservation efforts. The importance of this geospatial innovation is demonstrated with newly acquired LiDAR data from the archaeological sites of Caracol, Cayo, Belize and Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico. These data illustrate the potential of technology to act as a catalytic enabler of rapid transformational change in archaeological research and interpretation and also underscore the value of on-the-ground archaeological investigation in validating and contextualizing results.
Policy makers across the tropics propose that carbon finance could provide incentives for forest frontier communities to transition away from swidden agriculture (slash‐and‐burn or shifting ...cultivation) to other systems that potentially reduce emissions and/or increase carbon sequestration. However, there is little certainty regarding the carbon outcomes of many key land‐use transitions at the center of current policy debates. Our meta‐analysis of over 250 studies reporting above‐ and below‐ground carbon estimates for different land‐use types indicates great uncertainty in the net total ecosystem carbon changes that can be expected from many transitions, including the replacement of various types of swidden agriculture with oil palm, rubber, or some other types of agroforestry systems. These transitions are underway throughout Southeast Asia, and are at the heart of REDD+ debates. Exceptions of unambiguous carbon outcomes are the abandonment of any type of agriculture to allow forest regeneration (a certain positive carbon outcome) and expansion of agriculture into mature forest (a certain negative carbon outcome). With respect to swiddening, our meta‐analysis supports a reassessment of policies that encourage land‐cover conversion away from these especially long‐fallow systems to other more cash‐crop‐oriented systems producing ambiguous carbon stock changes – including oil palm and rubber. In some instances, lengthening fallow periods of an existing swidden system may produce substantial carbon benefits, as would conversion from intensely cultivated lands to high‐biomass plantations and some other types of agroforestry. More field studies are needed to provide better data of above‐ and below‐ground carbon stocks before informed recommendations or policy decisions can be made regarding which land‐use regimes optimize or increase carbon sequestration. As some transitions may negatively impact other ecosystem services, food security, and local livelihoods, the entire carbon and noncarbon benefit stream should also be taken into account before prescribing transitions with ambiguous carbon benefits.
Malnutrition and food insecurity remain high in rural Rwanda, where residents consume a low-diversity diet provided through subsistence farming. Agricultural interventions using kitchen gardens may ...improve diet diversity in some populations. However, little is known about their efficacy when developed using community-based participatory research in combination with nutrition education focused on the empowerment of women. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a kitchen garden and nutrition education intervention using a community-engaged model and examine its impact on household diet diversity and food security. Using a mixed methods community-level design, we assessed a 16-week intervention implemented in Cyanika, Rwanda. Stratified purposeful sampling was used to select women participants representing 42 households. Household diet diversity scores (HHDS) and hunger scores were calculated at the baseline, post-intervention and one-year follow-up. HDDS increased after intervention from a pre-intervention intake of 2.59 1.3 food groups/day, to 4.85 1.6 at four months post-intervention and at one year post-intervention, reaching 5.55 1.3. There were no significant changes in household hunger scores. Our results indicate that collaborative community-engaged nutrition-sensitive agricultural interventions can increase household diet diversity; however, future work should explore whether this type of intervention strategy can lead to sustained changes and impact nutritional adequacy in this population.
The Mosquitia ecosystem of Honduras occupies the fulcrum between the American continents and as such constitutes a critical region for understanding past patterns of socio-political development and ...interaction. Heavy vegetation, rugged topography, and remoteness have limited scientific investigation. This paper presents prehistoric patterns of settlement and landuse for a critical valley within the Mosquitia derived from airborne LiDAR scanning and field investigation. We show that (i) though today the valley is a wilderness it was densely inhabited in the past; (ii) that this population was organized into a three-tiered system composed of 19 settlements dominated by a city; and, (iii) that this occupation was embedded within a human engineered landscape. We also add to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the utility of LiDAR as means for rapid cultural assessments in undocumented regions for analysis and conservation. Our ultimate hope is for our work to promote protections to safeguard the unique and critically endangered Mosquitia ecosystem and other similar areas in need of preservation.
Coffee is considered a boom crop in Southeast Asia. However, while it bears typical boom crop characteristics in many places where it has been grown, in other places it has contributed to agrarian ...transformation. This paper examines the context of coffee development in the Northwestern Mountain Region of Vietnam and describes how smallholder coffee growing has triggered an agricultural transition process, and corresponding land use changes, from subsistence-based to commercialized agriculture production. The research was conducted in a commune located in Son La province. Interviews with 46 selected households and three focus group discussions (10–15 people each) were conducted to understand changes in crop systems, corresponding land use, and labor use, due to the adoption of coffee (the boom crop). The research found that coffee has replaced swidden crops and enables a multicrop system, with less land devoted to swidden land use. The income from coffee is used to hire labor and to pay for the inputs needed to mechanize rice farming. The research findings show that the coffee boom has brought about livelihood transformation, changed land use, and transformed local livelihoods from subsistence to production for the market.
It is a conundrum of the 21st Century that there is much left to discover and yet never before has our cultural and ecological patrimony been so threatened. This is especially true in tropical ...regions where heavy vegetation, inaccessibility, and rugged topography hamper investigation. Here we present two case studies that add to a growing body of literature demonstrating the utility of airborne mapping LiDAR (a.k.a. Airborne Laser Scanning) for rapid archaeological assessments in poorly documented regions. The first outlines a program of LiDAR scanning to better understand the urban center of Angamuco in the Mexican State of Michoacán. This work shows that (1) large urban centers with complex spatial organization were present centuries prior to the formation of the Purépecha Empire; (2) the settlement incorporates gardens and other landscape features within and around the settlement demonstrating a high degree of human environmental modification; and (3) current models for the evolution of social complexity in the region cannot account for the presence of Angamuco. The second presents the results of a LiDAR survey of a remote valley in the Mosquitia tropical wilderness of Honduras which has seen little archaeological research. Here we demonstrate that (1) though today the valley is a wilderness it was densely inhabited in the past; (2) this population was organized into a three-tiered system composed of 19 settlements dominated by a city; and (3) this occupation was embedded within a human engineered landscape. For both, LiDAR data fundamentally changed the understanding of coupled human/natural systems in these areas while providing critical baseline data for conservation and management.
This paper examines how the structure of rural households in Northeast Thailand is influenced by the availability of local non-farm employment opportunities. It compares the frequency of different ...types of households (i.e., nuclear, extended, skipped generation, and truncated households) in two villages that were similar in most respects but differed in the shares of households with members having local non-farm employment. Almost three-quarters of all households in the village with a large share of households having members with local non-farm employment were of the extended and nuclear types. In the village with a small share of households having members with such employment, half of all households were of the skipped generation and truncated types. The extent of out-migration of young adult villagers seeking jobs in large cities also varied according to the availability of local non-farm employment. The village where many households have members with local non-farm employment had a smaller number of out-migrants. This contributes to its having more extended and nuclear households and fewer skipped generation and truncated households than the village with a greater number of out-migrants. These findings suggest that, in an area undergoing rapid economic development and modernization, rural household structure is strongly influenced by specific local economic conditions, in this case the availability of non-farm employment, rather than resulting from a universal trend toward the dominance of nuclear households as posited by convergence theory.
•Local non-farm employment strongly influences rural household structure and out-migration.•Extended and nuclear households are predominant in villages with high local employment rates.•Skipped generation and truncated households are common in villages with limited local employment.
Change from swidden cultivation to other land uses may indeed be desirable for some farmers, but in other cases such factors as prohibitive legislation, land reform, logging, large-scale land ...development, exclusionary conservation zoning, and resettlement are driving change towards new land use systems with consequences that are still poorly understood. Finally, the role of swidden cultivation in carbon storage is still poorly understood, partly because the carbon cycle of the soil-vegetation system is not well researched.
In recent years, the concepts of teleconnections and telecoupling have been introduced into land-use and land-cover change literature as frameworks that seek to explain connections between areas that ...are not in close physical proximity to each other. The conceptual frameworks of teleconnections and telecoupling seek to explicitly link land changes in one place, or in a number of places, to distant, usually non-physically connected locations. These conceptual frameworks are offered as new ways of understanding land changes; rather than viewing land-use and land-cover change through discrete land classifications that have been based on the idea of land-use as seen through rural-urban dichotomies, path dependencies and sequential land transitions, and place-based relationships. Focusing on the land-use and land-cover changes taking place along the East-West Economic Corridor that runs from Dong Ha City in Quang Tri, Vietnam, through Sepon District, Savannakhet, Lao PDR, into Thailand this paper makes use of data gathered from fieldwork and remote sensing analysis to examine telecouplings between sending, receiving and spill-over systems on both sides of the Vietnam-Lao PDR border. Findings are that the telecouplings are driving changes in rural village and urban systems on both sides of the border, and are enabled by a policy environment that has sought to facilitate the cross-border transportation of goods within the region.
In regions lacking socio-economic data, pairing satellite imagery with participatory information is essential for accurate land-use/cover (LULC) change assessments. At the village scale in Papua New ...Guinea we compare swidden LULC classifications using remote sensing analyses alone and analyses that combine participatory information and remotely sensed data. These participatory remote sensing (PRS) methods include participatory land-use mapping, household surveys, and validation of image analysis in combination with remotely sensed data. The classifications of the swidden area made using only remote sensing analysis show swidden areas are, on average, two and a half times larger than land managers reported for 1999 and 2011. Classifications made using only remote sensing analysis are homogeneous and lack discrimination among swidden plots, fallow land, and nonswidden vegetation. The information derived from PRS methods allows us to amend the remote sensing analysis and as a result swidden areas are more similar to actual swidden area found when ground-truthing. We conclude that PRS methods are needed to understand swidden system LULC complexities.
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