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The Role of Ethnobotanical Skills and Agricultural Labor in Forest Clearance: Evidence from the Bolivian Amazon

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/5861/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13280-010-0107-3
 
Title The Role of Ethnobotanical Skills and Agricultural Labor in Forest Clearance: Evidence from the Bolivian Amazon
 
Creator Reyes-Garcia, V
Pascual, U
Vadez, V
et al, .
 
Subject Agriculture-Farming, Production, Technology, Economics
 
Description Research on the benefits of local ecological knowledge for conservation lacks empirical data on the pathways through which local knowledge might affect natural resources management. We test whether ethnobotanical skills, a proxy for local ecological knowledge, are associated to the clearance of forest through their interaction with agricultural labor. We collected information from men in a society of gatherers–horticulturalist, the Tsimane’ (Bolivia). Data included a baseline survey, a survey of ethnobotanical skills (n = 190 men), and two surveys on agricultural labor inputs (n = 466 plots). We find a direct effect of ethnobotanical skills in lowering the extent of forest cleared in fallow but not in old-growth forest. We also find that the interaction between ethnobotanical skills and labor invested in shifting cultivation has opposite effects depending on whether the clearing is done in old-growth or fallow forest. We explain the finding in the context of Tsimane’ increasing integration to the market economy
 
Publisher Springer
 
Date 2011
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
Rights —
 
Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/5861/1/AMBIO_40_3_310%E2%80%93321_2011.pdf
Reyes-Garcia, V and Pascual, U and Vadez, V and et al, . (2011) The Role of Ethnobotanical Skills and Agricultural Labor in Forest Clearance: Evidence from the Bolivian Amazon. AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment, 40 (3). pp. 310-321. ISSN 0044-7447