Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This case study analyses a ban on the use of fire in a district of West-Kalimantan in response to the 2015 Southeast Asian Haze crisis. Based on stakeholder interviews and participant observation, I address the dilemmas encountered at the district and village level as a result of transnational environmental politics. A stark example of a wider tendency for policies to restrict swidden agriculture, the case study provides insight into the persistence of swidden . Contradictions between different stakeholders' experiences and understandings of local human ecology and haze politics ultimately rendered the ban ineffective...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Despite considerable field-based innovation and academic scrutiny, the nexus between conservation approaches, local support for parks and park effectiveness remains quite puzzling. Common approaches to understanding notions of environmental justice are to understand distributional and procedural issues, representation in decision making, and recognition of authorities and claims. We took a different approach and analysed environmental justice claims through institutional, ideational and psychological lenses...

Historically, the Sahel of West Africa has been considered synonymous with desertification. In recent decades, however, satellite images reveal patterns of enhanced vegetation termed the "greening of the Sahel." This greening is well-documented but its mechanisms remain poorly understood. The Sahel is also a region emerging from a thirty-year period of reduced rainfall in which several severe droughts occurred. As a response to droughts and land degradation, farmers have rehabilitated thousands of hectares of degraded soils by constructing low barriers of rock through widespread soil and water conservation (SWC) development projects...

There is growing recognition of the contribution of wild foods to local diets, nutrition, and culture. Yet disaggregation of understanding of wild food use by gender and age is limited. We used a mixed methods approach to determine the types, frequencies, and perceptions of wild foods used and sold by children in four villages in southern Malawi that have different levels of deforestation. Household and individual dietary diversity scores are low at all sites. All households consume one or more wild foods. Across the four sites, children listed 119 wild foods, with a wider variety at the least deforested sites than the most deforested ones...

Local ecological knowledge (LEK) increases understanding of certain species and the threats they face, especially little-studied taxa for which data on distribution and conservation are often lacking. We conducted 111 semi-structured interviews in Sarawak, Malaysia, to collect local knowledge about the behavior and distribution of the Philippine slow loris ( Nycticebus menagensis ) from two ethnic groups, the Iban and the Penan. Our study revealed that male Penan respondents, generally hunters, who frequently go into the forest were better at identifying animals from pictures...

In Europe, interest in wild forest products is increasing. Such products may be interpreted in a biological sense as deriving from autonomously growing forest species or in a biocultural sense as reflecting dynamics in human living with biodiversity through re-wilding of earlier domesticated species. In this article I elaborate the idea that the new interests reflect biocultural dynamics. First, I identify these dynamics as involving both domestication and re-wilding and characterize these processes as involving biological, environmental, and cultural dimensions...

The convergence of climate change and post-Soviet socio-economic and institutional transformations has been underexplored so far, as have the consequences of such convergence on crop agriculture in Central Asia. This paper provides a place-based analysis of constraints and opportunities for adaptation to climate change, with a specific focus on water use, in two districts in southeast Kazakhstan. Data were collected by 2 multi-stakeholder participatory workshops, 21 semi-structured in-depth interviews, and secondary statistical data...

New technologies have increasingly featured in environmental conservation conflicts. We examined the deployment of imaging devices such as sonar equipment and cameras to survey the Fal estuary in Cornwall, UK. Due to heavy use of these waters, there have been several disputes coalescing around protected marine features, including the estuary's rare maerl beds. A comparison of two cases, scallop dredging and docks development, showed technical instruments being deployed to produce information about the marine environment as evidence to inform decision-making...

Understanding the socio-ecology of disease requires careful attention to the role of patches within disease landscapes. Such patches, and the interfaces between different socio-epidemiological systems, we argue, have important implications for disease control. We conducted an interdisciplinary study over three years to investigate the spatial dynamics of human and animal trypanosomiasis in the Zambezi valley, Zimbabwe. We used a habitat niche model to identify changes in suitable habitat for tsetse fly vectors over time, and this is related to local villagers' understandings of where flies are found...

This paper investigates the once ubiquitous vernacular earth-built structures of Scotland and how perceptions of such buildings were shaped and developed through periods of intense cultural and environmental change. We focus upon the past exploitation of traditional resources to construct vernacular architectures and on changes in the perception of the resultant buildings. Historic earth-built structures are today deeply hidden within the landscapes of Scotland, although they were once a common feature of both urban and rural settlements...

Does anthropogenic environmental change constrain long-term sociopolitical outcomes? It is clear that human colonization of islands radically alters their biological and physical systems. Despite considerable contextual variability in local specificities of this alteration, I argue that these processes are to some extent regular, predictable, and have socio-political implications. Reviewing the data for post-colonization ecodynamics, I show that Neolithic colonization of previously insulated habitats drives biotic homogenization...

After major flooding associated with Hurricane Floyd (1999) in North Carolina, mitigation managers seized upon the "window of opportunity" to woo residents to accept residential buyout offers despite sizable community resistance. I present a theoretical explanation of how post-crisis periods turn into "opportunities" based on a temporal referential theory that complements alternative explanations based on temporal coincidence, panarchy, and shock-doctrine theories. Results from fieldwork conducted from 2002 to 2004 illustrate how several temporal influences compromised collective calibration of "normalcy" in local cultural models, leading to an especially heightened vulnerability to collective surprise...

As tropical landscapes become increasingly human-dominated, conflicts between people and wildlife threaten ecological processes. Old World fruit bats such as flying foxes are especially susceptible to extinction risk because there is low interest in their conservation, particularly when they are considered pests. In order to arrest fruit bat declines, there is an urgent need to understand human-bat conflict and its implications. On a tropical island in Peninsular Malaysia, we conducted a questionnaire survey to investigate coexistence between people and the island flying fox ( Pteropus hypomelanus )...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

This study explores the drivers of site selection amongst livestock owners under conditions of increasing animal numbers following a low point in the 1990s. Our major goal was to understand whether livestock owners are acting as 'optimal foragers,' targeting areas of highest forage availability as they colonise previously empty areas. The results presented here suggest that they do not. Initially, distance from home settlement was the dominant determinant of site occupancy, with closer sites occupied earlier regardless of other characteristics...

Evidence is increasing that climate change and variability may influence human migration patterns. However, there is less agreement regarding the type of migration streams most strongly impacted. This study tests whether climate change more strongly impacted international compared to domestic migration from rural Mexico during 1986-99. We employ eight temperature and precipitation-based climate change indices linked to detailed migration histories obtained from the Mexican Migration Project. Results from multilevel discrete-time event-history models challenge the assumption that climate-related migration will be predominantly short distance and domestic, but instead show that climate change more strongly impacted international moves from rural Mexico...

In the drylands of Africa, pastoralists have been facing new challenges, including those related to environmental shocks and stresses. In northern Kenya, under conditions of reduced rainfall and more frequent droughts, one response has been for pastoralists to focus increasingly on camel herding. Camels have started to be kept at higher altitudes and by people who rarely kept camels before. The development has been understood as a climate change adaptation strategy and as a means to improve climate resilience...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.