Packard Project: Funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation

Integrating Dynamics of Human Resource Use and Their Effects on Rainforests in Madagascar: Linking Landscape Ecology, Cultural Anthropology, Behavioral Ecology, and Applied Mathematics for a Science-Based Strategy against Deforestation in Madagascar.

Overview: This project is an interdisciplinary effort to address the problem of tropical forest destruction. We plan to bring four scientific disciplines together and interface them with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to understand the dynamics of this problem. Our approach combines anthropological and biological studies with modeling and statistical techniques. We can thereby address the interplay between village agricultural activity, deforestation, and survival of endangered species, gaining a tool to predict and facilitate change. We believe that the product of this interdisciplinary team from the natural, social, and mathematical sciences will produce results that have not been possible with one discipline alone.

The project conducts interdisciplinary research with the goal of understanding the complex dynamics of coupled human and natural systems in a region of critically endangered forest habitats (southeastern Madagascar). We have three goals. The first is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the complex interrelationships between human sociocultural systems and changes in land use in Madagascar. The second is to use this framework to assess the impact of current and projected land use on the viability of endangered species. The third goal is to provide an interdisciplinary approach to graduate and postdoctoral research in human and biodiversity field studies, mathematical and computer modeling techniques, and GIS applications.

Research Plan and Objectives: Our primary objective is to understand the “when, where and why” of deforestation and its effects on biodiversity. We will combine field studies, statistical analysis, GIS, and mathematical and computer modeling to address these questions. These results can be used to suggest solutions to the problem of deforestation. We will accomplish our research objectives through the following tasks:

Task 1: Integration of baseline data into a GIS database on land use, land cover and biodiversity distribution in southeastern Madagascar.

Task 2: Ethnographic surveys to determine economic and sociocultural factors influencing agricultural practices in the region.

Task 3: Biological research to evaluate impacts of habitat fragmentation on biodiversity.

Task 4: Synthesis of tasks 1-3via construction of a dynamic, spatially-explicit simulation model of regional land use and land cover change.

Packard Personnel:

Principal Investigator: Patricia Wright

Co-PI's: Tim Keitt, Karen Kramer

Senior Field Personnel: Frank Princee, Felix Ratelolahy

Annual Report Year 1 (July 2002-June 2003)

Annual Report Year 2 (July 2003-June 2004)

Annual Report Year 3 (July 2004-June 2005)