Smallholder agriculture results in stable forest cover in riverine Amazonia

Abstract

Recent studies point to a rapid increase in small-scale deforestation in Amazonia. Where people live along the rivers of the basin, customary shifting cultivation creates a zone of secondary forest, orchards and crop fields around communities in what was once was old-growth terra firme forest. Visible from satellite imagery as a narrow but extensive band of forest disturbance along rivers, this zone is often considered as having been deforested. In this paper we assess forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around 275 communities along a 725 km transect on the Napo and Amazon rivers in the Peruvian Amazon. We used high-resolution satellite imagery to define the ‘working area’ around each community, based on the spatial distribution of forest/field patches and the visible boundary between old-growth and secondary forests. Land cover change was assessed between ca. 1989 and 2015 using CLASliteTM image classification. Statistical analyses using community and household-level data from the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) Project identified the predictors of the extent of forest disturbance and the dynamics of secondary forests around communities. Although shifting cultivation is the primary driver of old-growth forest loss, we find that secondary forest cover which replaces old-growth forests is stable through time, and that both the area and rate of expansion into old-growth forests are modest when compared to forest conversion in Peru for colonization and plantation development. Our findings challenge the notion that smallholder agriculture along rivers is an important threat to terra firme forests in Amazonia and point to the importance of protecting forests on community lands from loggers, colonists and other outsiders.

Bacurú Drõa: Indigenous forest custody as an effective climate change mitigation option. A case study from Darién, Panama

“…Our results are similar to those from other studies showing that Indigenous or local community stewardship with functioning governance structures can support the conservation of nature and improved livelihoods of people (Kothari et al, 2014). For example, in the Northern Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous' and local communities' household footprints have remained both low and stable through time (Gray and Bilsborrow, 2020;Coomes et al, 2022). The Peruvian study was based on 275 communities and analyzed forest cover between 1989 to 2015 while the Ecuadorian study analyzed 500 households between 2001 to 2012 revealing a very low rate of primary forest clearing, which was mostly restricted in time to initial settlement, largely because local people prefer cultivating secondary growth forests (Coomes et al, 2022).…”

“…For example, in the Northern Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon, Indigenous' and local communities' household footprints have remained both low and stable through time (Gray and Bilsborrow, 2020;Coomes et al, 2022). The Peruvian study was based on 275 communities and analyzed forest cover between 1989 to 2015 while the Ecuadorian study analyzed 500 households between 2001 to 2012 revealing a very low rate of primary forest clearing, which was mostly restricted in time to initial settlement, largely because local people prefer cultivating secondary growth forests (Coomes et al, 2022). Likewise, the land management approaches currently employed by the inhabitants of Tierras Colectivas del Río Balsas allow sustaining the Emberá people while being highly successful at conserving the old-growth intact forests and their large C sinks.…”

Landscape-scale concordance between local ecological knowledge for tropical wild species and remote sensing of land cover

“…We resolved this significant data constraint by conducting a large-scale LEK survey among over 900 communities and nearly 4,000 households in 235 randomly sampled communities—the largest as yet undertaken in tropical forests. The survey was part of the Peruvian Amazon Rural Livelihoods and Poverty (PARLAP) project ( 32 – 34 ), which covers four major river basins—the Amazon, Napo, Pastaza, and Ucayali (near 120,000 km 2 , or about 2.4 times the area of Costa Rica; see Materials and Methods for a description of the study area, Fig. 1 A ).…”