Browsing by Subject "Conservation biogeography"

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Gender and tropical forest conservation in multi-use conservation areas : a case study from the western Amazon (Loreto, Peru)
(2020-05-08) Diamond, Sara Kehl; Young, Kenneth R.; Arima, Eugenio Y; Rudrappa, Sharmila M; Sletto, Bjorn I; Torres, Rebecca M
This dissertation investigates the role of gender in resource governance, land-use, and management in tropical forests. Using a theoretical framework grounded in Feminist Political Ecology and Conservation Biogeography, I asked: How is natural resource use changing in the face of shifting governance, community demographics, and land use policies? And, how does gender impact resource use and governance? Taking cultivated landscapes and family diets as a proxy for resource use practices at large, I engaged ethnographic methods, interviews, and focus groups over four field visits between 2013 and 2017 to investigate natural resource use and management of cultivated spaces in the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Regional Conservation Area (ACRCTT) in northeastern Peru. Cumulative results from 21 buffer area communities indicated that residents rely almost exclusively on local natural resources for their subsistence and livelihoods. Residents maintain between one and five agricultural plots per adult, and report utilizing 30 agricultural products, up to 249 non-agricultural botanical species (under 174 common names), up to 153 fish species, and 44 regularly hunted animals. One household however, may plant only a few or many (up to 24) different cultivated products spread between 1-8 different plots. These numbers do not include fruits and medicinal plants cultivated in kitchen gardens. Area natural resources are managed at local and regional scales simultaneously, but participation in governance is gendered and women face disproportionate barriers to engage in formal community and regional governance and in informal governance channels. Rapidly shrinking community populations and lack of demographic representation in area governance threatens the future of the ACRCTT and potentially disincentivizes adherence to local resource quotas implemented to ensure sustainable natural resource use. Rural community demographics are changing rapidly due to outmigration, which is driven primarily by educational opportunities for children. Decreased local populations can lead to a loss of locally normalized sustainable manament practices and an increase in commercial extractive acivites. Results of this study indicate that increased social services and increased educational quality in rural areas could slow family emigration to urban areas. This, plus increased inclusion of and representation by women at all levels of area governance could improve long term conservation outcomes in the ACRCTT.
Novel approaches to conservation biogeography across public and private lands
(2022-09-12) LeVine, Daniel Stephen; Crews, Kelley A.; Young, Kenneth R.; Miller, Jennifer A.; Jha, Shalene; Keitt, Timothy
Extensive land use change and global climate change present major threats to native ecosystems due to shifts in species ranges and the alteration of species assemblages through non-native species introductions. The conservation of these landscapes and associated biodiversity is pertinent and requires comprehensive biogeographic and ecological analyses that identify past, present, and future patterns of species distributions and ecosystem function. With an ever-increasing amount of spatial data related to species occurrences available through online citizen science platforms, the number and types of questions that can be answered related to conservation biogeography are rapidly expanding. However, spatial and taxonomic biases are known to exist in these datasets and the implementation of such data requires proper consideration. The application of these opportunistic datasets to conservation planning is further complicated by issues of access in settings with public/private land divides. The conceptual approach taken for this dissertation pulls from multiple subfields of environmental geography in order to adequately encapsulate the challenges inherent to local and regional scale conservation research and implementation. The assessment of a public/private landscape in the Texas Hill Country via satellite imagery and in situ vegetation surveys provides an example of spatially- and temporally- dynamic landscape assessment in a heterogeneous land tenure setting. The included spatial analyses of citizen science data investigate socioeconomic and demographic patterns in opportunistic species datasets and inform approaches to accounting for inherent spatial and taxonomic gaps in these data using the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexxipus) as a baseline species of analysis. Lastly, these studies are bridged together by an investigation of novel landscapes in Texas’ Blackland Prairies and the influence of exotic game ranching across Texas with discussion of the impacts of novel species assemblages and habitat fragmentation. The collected discussions and conclusions in this dissertation support recommendations for land managers and landowners and provide insight for conservation biogeographers working across spatially- and temporally- heterogeneous land tenure settings.