Summary. — Development and land use/land cover (LULC) change have altered the landscape inand around the Cuyabeno Wildlife Production Reserve in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon(NEA). Today, the Reserve covers approximately 600,000 ha and is home to a host of endemicplants and animals as well as ancestral territories of indigenous groups, including the Cofa´n, Siona,Secoya, and Quichua. This study examines demographic and socioeconomic drivers of LULCchange in and around the Reserve drawing upon a number of primary sources of data, includinghousehold surveys and a satellite image time series. We find that LULC patterns within and adja-cent to the Reserve are influenced by (1) changes in land tenure regimes in newly classified Patri-mony Forest, (2) petroleum exploration and production, (3) indigenous communities location,characteristics, and integration to the market economy, and (4) settlement patterns and householdcharacteristics of colonists. Statistical analyses suggest that the number of children in the house-hold, the use of hired labor, and geographic accessibility are important factors in explaining vari-ations in the extent of deforestation on household farms in the Patrimony Forest. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Key words — Ecuador, Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, Cuyabeno, land use/cover dynamics, col-onist populations, indigenous populations* This work is based on a project of the Carolina Population Center (CPC) and the Departments of Geography,Biostatistics, and Anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, in collaboration with EcoCienciafrom Quito, Ecuador. We are grateful to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (NCC5-295), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (R01-HD38777-01), and Mellon Foundation for supporting all aspectsof the project, and to the Summit and Compton Foundations and PROFORS (Programa Forestal Sucumbios, inLago Agrio, Ecuador, funded by GTZ, the German foreign aid program) for helping to support the householdsurvey data collection in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 1999; and to the Ministry of Environment of Ecuador and thePetramaz project for the household survey data in the Patrimony Forest area. CEPAR in Quito processed the 1999and 2001 household survey data for colonist and indigenous households, and the 2000 and 2001 community surveydata for ibid. These data were further cleaned and analyzed at CPC with the assistance of graduate studentssupported by traineeships funded by NIH (HD07168) to CPC and other sources. Carlos Mena would like to thankthe NASA Earth System Fellowship (NNG04GR12H) that supports his doctoral studies. We also would like tothank Joseph Messina and Paul Delamater of Michigan State University who classified the Landsat images, and LuisBorbor, manager of the Cuyabeno Reserve, who gave valuable insights in early stages of this study. Final revisionaccepted: February 27, 2006.World Development Vol. 34, No. 10, pp. 1831–1849, 2006 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved0305-750X/$ - see front matter