Understanding deforestation in the southern Yucatán: insights from a sub-regional, multi-temporal analysis

The southern Yucatán has been identified as a deforestation hot spot. Land-change studies document the extent of forest loss at a regional scale, and case studies provide insights into the drivers of deforestation at the household level. Those studies have paid minimal attention to sub-regional analysis, especially to discrete land-management units above the household level. This analysis of upland forest change addresses the range of variation in deforestation among 96 ejidos (communal lands) and the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, the two dominant land-tenure and land-management units in the region. Satellite imagery, census, and land-tenure data are used to establish the extent and location of deforestation patterns, and multivariate techniques are employed to identify biophysical and socioeconomic variables that explain such patterns. Results show that, for the 1984–1993 period, deforestation in the southern Yucatán was not as prevalent as implied by its hot spot designation. Three clusters of deforestation are identified. A logistic regression analysis establishes that size of forest holdings, population growth, and location in the precipitation gradient correlate with ejidos that experienced higher deforestation rates than the rest of the land-tenure units. For the 1993–2000 period, conservation programs and changes in the economic context of this “hollow frontier” contributed to reduce deforestation rates and extent. This analysis illustrates the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of much tropical forest change and caution that it should bring to simple formulations of modeling this change and prescribing policies to control it.     

Agricultural livelihood transition in the southern Yucatán region: diverging paths and their accompanying land changes

Land change science has demonstrated that rural livelihoods around the world both drive and reflect changing environmental regimes and political economic/structural transformations. This article explores the relationship between increasingly globalized rural livelihoods and in-place land change, assessing results from social surveys of smallholding households in the southern Yucatán region. We examine evidence for a transition in agricultural livelihood strategies as smallholders adjust to changing political economic and institutional conditions, and link these transitioning strategies to land use changes. Based on household surveys in 1997 and 2003, we comparatively assess both changes in the selection of livelihood strategies and in the land use and cover impacts of those strategies. Our results indicate that although impacts of given strategies have changed little over this period, there are increasing proportions of households pursuing two divergent adjustment paths—one of agricultural withdrawal and one of agricultural intensification and commercialization. We investigate what sociodemographic characteristics differentiate the groups of households following distinct livelihood strategies. Our findings point to the possibility of simultaneous and contradictory land change outcomes as smallholders adjust in different ways to their intensified incorporation into global economies.     

Land change in the southern Yucatán: case studies in land change science

The southern Yucatán Peninsular Region project was designed from the outset as an integrative, multidisciplinary program of study examining tropical deforestation in the largest track of seasonal tropical forest remaining in Mexico and in which smallholder agriculture and a major biosphere reserve are juxtaposed in regard to land uses and covers. Treating land as a coupled human–environment system, the project joins the remote sensing, environmental, social, and modeling sciences in a way that is now recognized as land change science. This paper introduces the project, the study region, and six papers that explore some of the coupled system dynamics in the region. These include the sub-regional variation in deforestation, the pan-regional adoption or anticipation of cattle ranching, the emergence of divergent household agricultural and overall livelihood strategies, the roles of cultural and household histories in agricultural livelihood choices, the temporal intensification of swidden cultivation and its implications for forest species, and carbon stocks across cultivation units, including a new econometric modeling application to forecast changes in these stocks.