Abstract
Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecological model and implement it with literature-derived ecological parameters for six shifting cultivation landscapes from three continents. Analyzing the model with the tools of dynamical systems analysis, we show that such landscapes exhibit two stable states, one characterized by high forest cover and agricultural productivity, and another with much lower values of these traits. For some combinations of agricultural pressure and ecological parameters both of these states can potentially exist, and the actual state of the forest depends critically on its historic state. In many cases, the landscapes’ ‘ecological resilience’, or amount of forest that could be destroyed without shifting out of the forested stability domain, declined substantially at lower levels of agricultural pressure than would lead to maximum productivity. A measure of ‘engineering resilience’, the recovery time from standardized disturbances, was independent of ecological resilience. These findings suggest that maximization of short-term agricultural output may have counterproductive impacts on the long-term productivity of shifting cultivation landscapes and the persistence of forested areas.
Highlights
Reducing deforestation in tropical landscapes remains a major thrust of efforts to mitigate climate change and preserve biological diversity
Recent scientific work has warned that some tropical regions are approaching critical tipping points and may undergo sudden shifts to a new ecological equilibrium characterized by reduced carbon storage and biological diversity [1], [2], with forests replaced by low-diversity grasslands, a phenomenon that has been observed in Madagascar [3] and Bolivia [4]
We further investigate how tropical forest resilience is linked to agricultural productivity by examining conditions where increasing agricultural land-use pressure at the landscape scale can lead to the collapse of both resilient forest ecosystems as well as the coupled agricultural production system
Summary
Reducing deforestation in tropical landscapes remains a major thrust of efforts to mitigate climate change and preserve biological diversity. As a result of such stressors, an increasing number of ecosystem collapses are being observed in tropical regions [6], [7]. Despite this observed pattern, factors that may push tropical forest landscapes into deforested, low-productivity and low-diversity stable states remain poorly understood. Factors that may push tropical forest landscapes into deforested, low-productivity and low-diversity stable states remain poorly understood This uncertainty hampers efforts to manage forested landscapes for human purposes while maintaining their ecological functions and cultural capital. We further investigate how tropical forest resilience is linked to agricultural productivity by examining conditions where increasing agricultural land-use pressure at the landscape scale can lead to the collapse of both resilient forest ecosystems as well as the coupled agricultural production system
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