Population, Land Use, and Environment Research Directions (2005) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
5 Population and Environment in Amazônia: Landscape and Household Dynamics--Emilio F. Moran, Eduardo S. Brondízio, and Leah K. VanWey
5 Population and Environment in Amazônia: Landscape and Household Dynamics--Emilio F. Moran, Eduardo S. Brondízio, and Leah K. VanWey
Pages 106-134
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 106... ...
To get at the causes of deforestation, we need to examine how households make constrained decisions within their regional context, the land tenure system in place, the opportunities available to households to use their resources, the needs of a given household shaped by age and gender structure, and how members of households understand and make use of their physical environment. This chapter documents the evolution of a project that has made use of a broad array of theories, methodologies, and conceptualizations linking 106
|
From page 107... ...
This project has fruitfully combined data from soil samples, remote sensing (aerial photos and satellite imagery) , social survey research, and in-depth qualitative data collection (ethnography, open-ended interviews)
|
From page 108... ...
Settlement of the Brazilian Amazon entailed the mass migration of families from throughout Brazil into the interior of the country, a region previously occupied primarily by indigenous groups.1 This dramatic demographic transformation of the Amazon was accompanied by changes in the environment, specifically by the removal of forests in favor of agriculture, and in economic infrastructure providing road access and establishing the presence of government institutions. In the tropics it has been all too common to blame the smallholder for tropical deforestation (Myers, 1984)
|
From page 109... ...
Studying the secondary succession dynamics at the level of vegetation stands and landscapes provided a context in which to understand cycles and strategies of land use, such as rates of fallowing, stages of lot formation, the role of soil fertility in the forest regenerative capacity, and the ability of farmers to keep cleared land in production (Moran and Brondizio, 1998; Moran, 1993; Moran et al., 1994, 1996, 2000; Tucker, Brondizio, and Moran, 1998)
|
From page 110... ...
Settlement schemes were a central part of this plan with the goal of populating the "empty" Amazon with settlers from throughout Brazil as a way of integrating a region that constituted 54 percent of the national territory into the national strategy of economic development (Programa de Integracao Nacional, 1971)
|
From page 111... ...
111 region. Altamira of grid Property 5-1 FIGURE
|
From page 112... ...
Most of the area was forested in 1971, except along those first 18 km out of town, and the settlement scheme began to divide land holdings from that point west of Altamira into a fishbone pattern. Large patches of fertile soils could be found along those first 20 km, and thus government officials promoted the fertility of the soils of the region as being uniformly high, which proved later not to be the case.
|
From page 113... ...
Over time, more complex arrangements have evolved, but the lack of a rigorous titling process has been one of the factors that has prevented a stable land market from emerging, and it may also have influenced the tendency not to fragment properties, as it would be even harder to establish rights to fragments than to entire properties. Inheritance of property has not been seen to be a problem, except in those cases in which several children wish to have land, and resolution of these cases is usually informal rather than legalized through titling.
|
From page 114... ...
As satellite imagery began to be used, it became clear that there was enormous variability in how farmers behaved with regard to the 50 hectares to remain in forest out of the total 100 hectares of each property, with some properties having deforested virtually the entire property, while others were well within the 50 percent established area. The conclusions of this first phase of the study were reported in several monographs (Moran, 1975, 1976, 1981)
|
From page 115... ...
THE SECOND STAGE OF THE PROJECT (1991-1996) : SECONDARY SUCCESSION AND LAND COVER CHANGE DYNAMICS Beginning in 1991, we moved from examining social outcomes for farm families to examining the environmental outcomes of human action in the region.
|
From page 116... ...
The goal of this intensive environmental data collection, besides improving the classification of remotely sensed data, was the linkage of detailed environmental information to farm-lot and regional trajectories of land cover change. Consequently, by combining the ability to discriminate deforestation events and stages of secondary succession with a property grid defining farm-lots, we were able to query and understand variation in land use and cover change at the levels of the farm and the larger landscape.
|
From page 117... ...
, whereas on the others soils, turnover was high. Moreover, we found that crop choice after 20 years of settlement had been profoundly affected by the soils present on the farm; we found a significant relationship between the percentage of fertile soils on properties and the diversity of the portfolio of the farm household, with over 80 percent of the area in pasture on the poor soils and a steady shift toward cash crops and tree crops with increases in the proportion of alfisols on the property (see Figure 5-3)
|
From page 118... ...
Baseline research on vegetation inventories and interviews about the use of fallow areas has provided guidance for image analysis and in understanding land cover change. These include estimating rates of regrowth across areas of different land use histories, mapping of different stages of secondary vegetation to characterize fallow cycles across different land use systems, assessing the occurrence of economic species in fallow areas, and estimating aboveground biomass in landscapes characterized by different land cover complexities (Tucker, Brondizio, and Moran, 1998; Brondizio et al., 1996; Moran et al., 1996, among others)
|
From page 119... ...
. As our work links to the larger literature on global environmental change, these variables on vegetation and soil and their relationship to spatially explicit spectral data have allowed us to contribute to debates about the estimation of carbon sequestered in secondary forests, nutrient cycling, and trajectories of forest recovery.
|
From page 120... ...
Our team put a significant investment of time, resources, and personnel into collecting differentially corrected ground control points, systematically visiting each feeder road in the region, collecting ground control points in at least two corners of lots, and interviewing farmers about the shape and dimensions of lots. This corrected property grid allowed the project to make inferences about the impact of individual households on the land cover.
|
From page 121... ...
introduced systematic ecological methods for measuring species diversity, forest cover, remotely sensed data, GIS for integrating data, and spatial analyses. These innovations arose from efforts of Moran to develop remote sensing skills and from the addition of Brondizio to the core research team, as Brondizio came in with substantial skills in remote sensing and botany.
|
From page 122... ...
. A particular contribution of this project to the population and environment methodologies is the generation of spatially explicit sampling approaches.
|
From page 123... ...
With that in mind, in 2003 we began a new phase of the population and environment project, which added a much older settlement site wherein we might observe whether the cycles repeat themselves in the second and third generations. This new phase also added questions informed by traditional household demography approaches, focusing on the movement of individuals into and out of households and on the allocation of household labor.
|
From page 124... ...
. Land titling is relatively secure, and there is an active land market in the area.
|
From page 125... ...
Because of the rapid rate of land acquisitions by outsiders, there is a high level of suspicion by local small farmers toward outside visitors coming to ask questions about their farms. In this current NICHD-funded work, we have also built on past work on spatially explicit sampling procedures.
|
From page 126... ...
In the current work, we collected information on all lots resulting from the fragmentation of past lots appearing in our sample and on larger lots that included lots appearing in our sample. Thus, we take the property grid from which we sampled as a representation of reality at some point in the past and are able to study how lot boundaries have changed since then.
|
From page 127... ...
POPULATION AND ENVIRONMENT IN AMAZÔNIA 127 FIGURE 5-5 Property grid of Santarém region, showing sub-regions and sampling grid cells within each of the sub-regions.
|
From page 128... ...
In Altamira we were able to observe the process of settlement virtually from its start in 1971 to the present and to account for changes in family structure, migration rates, areas of origin, soil fertility, road quality, and available credit. These elements influenced the decisions of household members in a variety of ways that permit reasonably well-informed inferences about the trajectories of change.
|
From page 129... ...
The impact of soybeans on forest cover is not expected to be large in existing farms, as most farms would have their remaining forests in areas where flat land is less likely, or where wetlands are present, as most good soils on flatter land are already in cultivation. The reality is that people are interacting with the physical environment in a myriad of ways -- from the cognitive act of choosing where to settle, whom to migrate with, whether they pick flat or steep terrain, whether they give priority to proximity to a water supply or not, to soil color or not, whether they interact with natives or keep to themselves, whether they collect germplasm regularly from neighbors or import it from areas of origin, whether they have the knowledge and the means to practice contraception, and how the timing of contraception fits with views they may have of desirable family size and long-term goals for those children and themselves.
|
From page 130... ...
This is dynamic analysis requiring complex alternative scenarios, driven by stochastic processes and by sudden shocks coming from external political, economic, and environmental sources. Our challenge is to explore these dynamic interactions without simplifying them to the point that we deceive ourselves that we understand the system completely.
|
From page 131... ...
Brondizio, and E.F. Moran 2002 Aboveground biomass estimation of successional and mature forests using TM images in the Amazon basin.
|
From page 132... ...
Rodriguez-Pedraza 1999 Remote sensing and GIS at farm property level: Demography and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 65(11)
|
From page 133... ...
Siqueira, and E.S. Brondizio 2003 Household demographic structure and its relationship to the Amazon Basin.
|
From page 134... ...
Moran 1998 Rates of forest regrowth in eastern Amazônia: A comparison of Altamira and Bragantina regions, Para, Brazil. Interciencia 23(2)
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.