Crucial Papers
These are some papers which are crucial to our own research. Click on the title to be linked to the article. The explanatory texts are drawn from the respective abstracts.
Games
We assessed the perceptions and behavior of rubber agroforest farmers under existing conservation agreements as a step toward institutionalized reward schemes for agro-biodiversity using questionnaires and role-playing games (RPG).
This article works toward a conceptual framework for designing games to support policy development for managing natural resources. The point of departure for this framework is a typology for functions of games in support of policy.
Land Use
Launched in 1994, the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn Programme is a multidisciplinary collaborative research effort aimed at addressing the issue of deforestation. This article analyzes the genesis and the history of this research effort and the causes of its successes and failures.
We combine emerging knowledge from tropical forest succession, forest fragmentation and landscape ecology research to identify the main driving forces shaping successional pathways at different spatial scales. We also explore causal connections between land-use dynamics and the level of predictability of successional pathways, and examine potential implications of such connections to determine the importance of secondary forests for biodiversity conservation in HMTLs.
This paper applies the Land Use Dynamics Simulator (LUDAS) framework presented by Le et al. [Ecological Informatics 3 (2008) 135] to a mountain watershed in central Vietnam for supporting the design of land-use policies that enhance environmental and socio-economical benefits in long term. With an exploratory modelling strategy for complex integrated systems, our purpose is to assess relative impacts of policy interventions by measuring the long-term landscape and community divergences (compared with a baseline) driven from the widest plausible range of options for a given policy.
Increasing food production and mitigating climate change are two primary but seemingly contradictory objectives for tropical landscapes. This special feature examines synergies and trade-offs among these objectives. Four themes emerge from the papers: the important roles of both forest and agriculture sectors for climate mitigation in tropical countries; the minor contribution from deforestation-related agricultural expansion to overall food production at global and continental scales; the opportunities for synergies between improved food production and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through diversion of agricultural expansion to already-cleared lands, improved soil, crop, and livestock management, and agroforestry; and the need for targeted policy and management interventions to make these synergistic opportunities a reality
One of the leading candidates for wildlife-friendly farming in the megadiverse lowland tropics is shade-grown cocoa. However, tropical farmers increasingly believe that shade reduces yield and consequently, are removing most shade trees from their farms. Conservation goals therefore conflict with production imperatives. Nevertheless, we tested the trade-off between production and biodiversity conservation in the critical conservation area of the Ecuadorean Chocó.
The Anthropocene is characterized as an epoch when human influence has begun to fundamentally alter many aspects of the Earth system and many of the planet's biomes. Here, we review and synthesize our understanding of Anthropocene changes in tropical forests.
Diversity & Resilience
Using the widely accepted Convention on Biological Diversity definition of biodiversity and work for the UK National Ecosystem Assessment we show that biodiversity has key roles at all levels of the ecosystem service hierarchy. Ecosystem science and practice has not yet absorbed the lessons of this complex relationship, which suggests an urgent need to develop the interdisciplinary science of ecosystem management bringing together ecologists, conservation biologists, resource economists and others.
Two decades ago, at the first Earth Summit, the vast majority of the world's nations declared that human actions were dismantling the Earth's ecosystems, eliminating genes, species and biological traits at an alarming rate. This observation led to the question of how such loss of biological diversity will alter the functioning of ecosystems and their ability to provide society with the goods and services needed to prosper.
We outline several diversity factors that modellers and models can include directly or indirectly in order to improve the accuracy and usefulness of the model. Without considering these factors, different types of diversity deficit can arise.
Resilience, a system’s ability to adjust its activity to retain its basic functionality when errors, failures and environmental changes occur, is a defining property of many complex systemsexternal page1call_made. Despite widespread consequences for human health, the economy and the environment, events leading to loss of resilience—from cascading failures in technological systems to mass extinctions in ecological networks—are rarely predictable and are often irreversible. These limitations are rooted in a theoretical gap: the current analytical framework of resilience is designed to treat low-dimensional models with a few interacting components, and is unsuitable for multi-dimensional systems consisting of a large number of components that interact through a complex network. Here we bridge this theoretical gap by developing a set of analytical tools with which to identify the natural control and state parameters of a multi-dimensional complex system, helping us derive effective one-dimensional dynamics that accurately predict the system’s resilience.
Frameworks & Analysis
Here, we present an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of relationships between functional diversity, ecosystem services, and human actions that is applicable to specific social environmental systems at local scales. We connect the mechanistic understanding of the ecological role of diversity with its social relevance: ecosystem services.
This paper is a contribution to elaborate the theoretical and epistemic foundations of institutional mapping and its legitimacy and to get it tob e granted by the academic community. To do so it introduces mapping as a cognitive process and explore in this context the structural similarities between maps and theories in the first part. The second part goes a step further and discusses two concrete examples that may come close to illustrate the meta-theoretical ideal-type outlined at the end of the first part.
Interdisciplinary research frameworks can be useful in providing answers to the environmental challenges facing rural environments, but concrete implementation of them remains empirical and requires better control. We present our practical experience of an interdisciplinary research project dealing with non-industrial private forestry in rural landscapes. The theoretical background, management, and methodological aspects, as well as results of the project, are presented in order to identify practical key factors that may influence its outcomes.
An integrated framework for assessing conservation and development changes at the scale of a large forest landscape in the Congo Basin is described. The framework allows stakeholders to assess progress in achieving the often conflicting objectives of alleviating poverty and conserving global environmental values.
Research into land and social-ecological systems science could benefit from improved clarity in the terminology used for causal analysis and a structured way to make causal inferences. Here I identify two aspects of causality, i.e. causal effects and causal mechanisms, and discuss explanation in historical sciences. I then propose definitions for the major terms used for causal relations, including driver, (spatial) determinant, location and contextual factor, proximate and underlying factors.
Tragedy of the Commons, Wicked problems & Social Sciences
Applied economics needs to become better acquainted with wicked problems; they are pervasive, and they present challenges if applied economics is to retain its relevance in today’s world. This paper explores these challenges but is necessarily exploratory, as widespread recognition of the complexity of wicked problems is leading to new kinds of research, but these research approaches are still evolving.
external pageHardin G (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 162(3859): 1243–1248call_made.
Explaining why the population problem has no technical solution but requires a fundamental extension in morality.
Contemporary policy analysis of the governance of common-pool resources is based on three core assumptions: (a) resource users are norm-free maximizers of immediate gains, who will not cooperate to overcome the commons dilemmas they face; (b) designing rules to change incentives of participants is a relatively simple analytical task; and (c) organization itself requires central direction. The chapter shows that these assumptions are a poor foundation for policy analysis.
Which policy initiatives most effectively curb the illegal bushmeat trade? How should public awareness programs be designed to reflect learning differences across age groups? In what markets are ecolabeling programs best suited to create the economic incentives for sustainable fisheries? What cultural beliefs and values drive the international trade in endangered species for medici-nal purposes? How will long-term conservation planning and protection in Africa be affected by the demographic impacts of HIV/AIDS? The list could go on for pages. The real question for debate, of course, is not whether to integrate the social sciences into conservation but how to do so. As a starting point for discussion, we offer a few suggestions to the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB), conservation organizations, and the academic community.