Rainforest Project Research Articles

Voices of the Rainforest and Gifts that Keep on Giving

This essay is a responsorial introduction to seven critical reviews of the Voices of the Rainforest project in Bosavi Papua New Guinea. Beginning with a 1991 CD production and growing to an immersive surround sound film, a 2nd edition recomposed CD, and a photobook thirty years later, the project explores collaborative research in and as art practice, and its actual history and future potential as cultural advocacy through media. The responsorial introduction and following papers (from researchers in Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the USA) situate the intermedia work of Voices of the Rainforest in genealogies of research and reflection linking place and memory, voice and agency, nostalgia and affect, sensory history and relationality, ecology and cosmology, and Papua New Guinea history since independence.

"Slash-and-burn ecology": Field science as land use.

Historians of science can benefit from thinking more deeply about land. Scholarly emphasis on the geographies of scientific knowledge has become pervasive since the "spatial turn" of the late 1990s. At the same time, the history of science has increasingly intersected with environmental history. Despite these growing connections, historians of science have been slow to embrace a core concern of environmental history: land. While space and place now have a rich literature in the historiography of science, land appears in histories of science in more scattered, incidental ways - largely as a place where science may occur or be applied. More than just a unit of ground, land is analytically connected to a web of questions about labor, property, governance, identity, and environmental change explored by environmental historians, geographers, and political ecologists. This article examines what historians of science - particularly, but not exclusively, historians of the field and environmental sciences - have to gain by taking land more seriously. A reexamination of the Rain Forest Project (1962-1970), a radioecology study initiated by systems ecologist Howard Thomas Odum in what is today El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico, serves as a case in point. Viewing this field site as land reframes ecologists' fieldwork as a form of land use, highlighting its place within regimes of land tenure, its connections with other communities' uses of the land, and its persistent local legacies.

The cultural antiquity of rainforests: Human–plant associations during the mid-late Holocene in the interior highlands of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo

Rainforests are often described as the world's last virgin landscapes; however hunter–gatherers may have been modifying these environments for over 50,000 years. Despite this, the antiquity of early tropical forest exploitation by hunter–gathers and the transition to farming are still poorly understood. Today globalization drives deforestation of rainforests at an unprecedented rate. The forest, the lives of its present-day inhabitants, and the archaeological evidence for their history are unlikely to survive for much longer in their present form. The ‘Cultured Rainforest Project’, an interdisciplinary project involving anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeoecologists, was set up in 2007 to investigate the long-term and present-day interactions between people and the rainforest in the Kelabit Highlands of central Borneo, so as to better understand past and present agricultural and hunter–gatherer lifestyles and landscapes. This paper examines the environmental evidence used to investigate initial signs of plant exploitation and the transition to agriculture, as well as to understand the wider significance of past plants in a changing cultural landscape. Results have shown that two pronounced cultural waves of human–plant interactions took place in the Kelabit Highlands during the late Holocene; although tentative marks may be present on the landscape ca.7000–6000 years ago. The first pronounced wave of human–plant interaction begins from at least 3000 cal BP. It seems to correspond with the appearance of stone mounds and open-air sites recorded in the archaeological record. The sago palm Eugeissona plays an important role during this period. A second wave of cultural activity, particularly in the last 450 years, is recorded in the southern Kelabit Highlands and is marked by rice becoming important. This may be linked to the construction of a wide range of different megaliths and earthworks, due to its inferred association with wealth and status in prehistoric and historic periods. It is perhaps also linked to a rise in trade between the coastal regions and highlands.

A pollen morphology study from the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo

Despite the rich biodiversity of plants in the islands of southeast Asia, modern pollen reference collections are still sparse for this part of the world. With only limited availability of pollen data, the ability to answer questions, regarding climate change and environmental change, to aid archaeological investigations through the reconstruction of past vegetation, or even for modern investigations, is challenging. No palynological work had ever been carried out in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, before this investigation. During 2007–2008, as part of the ‘Cultured Rainforest Project’, a number of cores were extracted for multi-proxy palaeoecological analysis, including pollen analysis. The cores produced a 50,000-year record of climate, environmental and later anthropogenic change. To aid fossil pollen identification, a modern pollen reference collection was also established. In August 2008, 253 modern plant species from a wide range of habitats were collected from in and around the villages of Bario and Pa’Dalih. Specimens were identified at the Department of Forestry Sarawak Herbarium (SAR), whilst pollen slides from all of the plant specimens were prepared at Queens University Belfast. This paper presents a detailed account of the pollen grains (176 species) collected from the Kelabit Highlands, and from SAR (25 species).

Fruit Trees Associated with Settlement Sites in The Upper Kelapang Area, Kelabit Highlands: A Preliminary Study

Fruit trees have been an integral part of the life of the Kelabits who have lived for generations in the Upper Kelapang area. A wide variety of wild fruit trees occurs at Pa Dalih, as documented by Christensen (2002). The Cultured Rainforest: Long-term human ecological histories in the highlands of Borneo is a project running from 2007 to 2010 and headed by Professor Graeme Barker of the University of Cambridge. The project aims to investigate long-term and present-day interactions between people and rainforest in the Kelabit Highlands of central Borneo, so as to better understand past and present agricultural and hunter-gatherer lifestyles and landscapes. It has been established that the Kelapang River area consists of a patchwork of sites formerly occupied by the Kelabit (and associated ethnic groups) who moved around the area and established new settlements governed by factors that included availability of land for subsistence agriculture, intertribal warfare, marriage affiliation, population size and superstitions. The study on fruit trees reported here is a component of The Cultured Rainforest project. The objective of the study was to investigate fruit trees as signifiers of social relationships and more specifically to determine the identity and distribution of selected fruit tree entities (and in some cases, who planted them) in the Upper Kelapang area of the Kelabit Highlands in order to establish which were, and are, important to the Kelabit communities who had occupied this area till today.

Ecotourism and Institutional Structures: The Case of North Rupununi, Guyana

This study examines the impact of ecotourism ventures in the Amerind communities of Guyana. It compares the impact on livelihoods, conservation and governance of the different institutional frameworks through which ecotourism services are delivered. The central focus is directed to the region in which the world famous Iwokrama Rainforest project was established with widespread institutional support. The outcomes for ecotourism developed by this project are compared with the operations of a private company and a local community-based ecotourism enterprise. The North Rupununi area is inhabited by Amerindians who have always utilised rainforest resources for their livelihoods but are gradually being absorbed into the global economy. They remain by far the poorest communities in Guyana but there are powerful claims that ecotourism can materially assist in improving their livelihoods. At the same time there are strong pressures through agencies such as the Iwokrama Reserve to maintain pristine rainforest ecologies and therefore the agencies argue that an ecotourism approach can be used to satisfy both conservation and livelihood demands.

Biodiversity and climate form focus of forest canopy plan

International rainforest project looks skywards.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Assessing and managing the sociocultural impacts of ecotourism: revisiting the Santa Elena rainforest project

This paper outlines the second phase of an ecotourism project undertaken in the Santa Elena community, in the Monteverde region of Costa Rica. The community originally established a rainforest reserve with the help of Youth Challenge International in an attempt to provide a wider economic base and employment for the area. The project has been successful in the first phase in that it is now drawing an annual income of US$40 000 and it employs guides and management from the local community. In terms of the underlying principles usually aligned with ecotourism it has been successful but it is now necessary to evaluate the impacts this project is having on the community. The second phase of the project was to assess the sociocultural impacts of ecotourism on that community and the paper outlines this phase.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Cambridge‐Tanzania Rainforest Project 1992: Brief Account of Ornithological Results and Conservation Proposals

IbisVolume 136, Issue 1 p. 107-108 The Cambridge-Tanzania Rainforest Project 1992: Brief Account of Ornithological Results and Conservation Proposals A. J. Hipkiss, Corresponding Author A. J. Hipkiss41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this authorL. G. Watson, Corresponding Author L. G. Watson41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this authorT. D. Evans, Corresponding Author T. D. Evans41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this author A. J. Hipkiss, Corresponding Author A. J. Hipkiss41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this authorL. G. Watson, Corresponding Author L. G. Watson41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this authorT. D. Evans, Corresponding Author T. D. Evans41 Burlington Road, Polygon, Southampton SO1 2FR. UKSearch for more papers by this author First published: January 1994 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1474-919X.1994.tb08139.xCitations: 3AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume136, Issue1January 1994Pages 107-108 RelatedInformation

International Rain-forest Project Launched at Britain's Royal Geographical Society

International Rain-forest Project Launched at Britain's Royal Geographical Society

The Society's Maraca Rainforest Project, Roraima, Brazil

This paper outlines the genesis of the Maracai Project in an invitation from the Brazilian Secretariat of the Environment and describes the uninhabited Mlaracai Island in northern Brazil. The evolution and funding of the Project are described, as are the logistic, administrative and medical arrangements for the field-workers (ultimately 117 Brazilian and 31 British scientists, with 55 scientific technicians). The paper moves on to provide a preliminary overview of the methods andl results of the Project, which involved genuine exploration and whose main scientific purpose was an ecological survey. to which all the scientists contributed data as well as working on their own specialist research. In particular, research was undertaken on: forest regeneration; the ftorest-savanna boundary; and soils in relation to the forest water cycle. In many ways these were the most important research programmes, of interest to geomorphologists and forest ecologists. Human geography was not, however, neglected: the author of this paper studied the history of settlement in adjacent areas, while 'ork was also done on recent government-sponsorcd resettlement.