Birgit Schmook

• PhD in Geography
• Senior Researcher at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur

Objetivo: Analizar las percepciones de habitantes de comunidades rurales marginadas sobre la pandemia de COVID-19 y la influencia de los Determinantes Sociales de la Salud en su experiencia ante la enfermedad. Metodología: Realizamos 72 entrevistas semiestructuradas en 6 comunidades de la zona de Calakmul, Campeche. Analizamos los datos a través de...

Swidden smallholders are among the most vulnerable groups to climate change. Many efforts have focused on incentivizing their transition to agroforestry, often with limited results. Such transitions, embedded in complex socio-environmental changes, generate uncertainties, often ignored in the science-policy interface. In this paper, we examine disp...

Los puestos a pie de carretera son una estrategia de venta directa de agricultores en el sureste mexicano, sin embargo, hasta la fecha, no se ha analizado su importancia en la comercialización de agrobiodiversidad y en la economía. En este estudio se caracterizaron y tipificaron los puestos en el sistema rural-urbano cercano a la ciudad de Villaher...

En el presente artículo se analizan los temas de violencia de género, acoso sexual y discriminación en el aula en una escuela urbana a través de las experiencias de adolescentes de ascendencia indígena en la ciudad de Chetumal, Quintana Roo. Se utilizaronmétodos cuantitativos y de sig, con información del Censo de Población 2010 para la identificac...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, generally viewed as policies to modernize and increase agricultural production and commercialization, also have social and environmental impacts. Among the first Mexican CCT programs, PROCAMPO is directed toward traditional agriculture and pays farmers for permanent cultivation, ignoring traditional fallow...

Promoting tolerance towards wildlife that pose a threat to humans or their livelihoods is critical to achieving species conservation goals. While conservation discourses often revolve around retaliation, tolerance and intolerance can vary from passive acceptance to active support, and according to level and scale of loss. We developed an experiment...

Systematic review of how remittances affect land systems.

Indigenous and rural peoples have developed close connections with land and nature for millennia. Traditional and local knowledge resulting from such human-environment interactions is embedded in ethnic, linguistic, and cultural contexts, and may assist local communities in adapting to global issues such as climate change. However, the extent to wh...

Conservation biology is a mission‐driven discipline that must navigate a new relationship between conservation and science. Because conservation is a social and political as well as an ecological project, conservation biologists must practice interdisciplinarity and collaboration. In a comparative study of 7 cases (Jaguars in the Chaco, Grevy's zeb...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had many deep social and economic impacts that go beyond health issues. One consequence is that the pandemic has made it even harder to mobilize the financial resources needed to pursue SDG 13 (Climate Action) as a whole and to fund climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in particular. This is especially acute in...

Mexico’s neoliberal agrarian policies incentivize intensification, privatization, and field rotation regulations, often by stating that these practices conserve forest from inefficient land use. In Mexico’s Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, this policy discourse is interpreted by smallholders and preconditions land use decisions and subsequent loca...

Global processes manifesting as activities in local places have led to an increase in documented conservation conflicts. Conservation conflicts are sometimes labelled human-wildlife conflict, focusing only on the direct negative impact of species (usually wildlife) on humans or vice versa. However, many authors now recognize that conservation confl...

Borderlands can be places of socioeconomic tensions, development challenges, and ecological risks, now exacerbated by climate change. We investigate the border-development-climate change nexus using research from Calakmul, Mexico and Petén, Guatemala, to detail the lived experiences and vulnerabilities of campesinos in the Selva Maya cross-border r...

Much smallholder farming currently exists side by side with large-scale, industrial agriculture, as an outcome of the Green Revolution unfolding in uneven and dualistic terms. In Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands, state incentives fuel expansion of industrial export agriculture. Large-scale sugarcane production has come to surround rural farming communi...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had many deep social and economic impacts that go beyond health issues. One consequence is that the pandemic has made it even harder to mobilize the financial resources needed to pursue SDG 13 (Climate Action) as a whole and to fund climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in particular. This is especially acute in...

Smallholder farmers commonly use fire for land clearing and agricultural maintenance in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The southern Yucatán Peninsular Region (SYPR) has experienced increasing fire frequency since the 1960s due to expanding smallholder agriculture and recurrent droughts. Beginning in January 2019, a government-subsidized programme...

[English below] Cuando se hace referencia al cambio climático, el imaginario colectivo nos hace pensar en el derretimiento de los glaciares o en osos polares famélicos que están a la deriva en un vasto océano sobre un pedazo de hielo minúsculo. Difícilmente nos imaginamos las consecuencias de los problemas ambientales y cómo éstos afectan ya y segu...

Decentralization of fisheries management in Mexico has created overlapping state agencies without clearly defined responsibilities. This has generated a management dilemma for national fisheries enforcement, due to ambiguity in implementation and legislation among agencies. Through a case study in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, in the Yucatan Pe...

El aprovechamiento forestal en el sureste de México se realiza desde la civilización Maya mediante usos tradicionales, concesiones forestales hasta la propiedad comunal. Actualmente, la mitad de los ejidos de Quintana Roo están enfocados en el aprovechamiento forestal maderable, principalmente en selvas medianas subperennifolias, el tipo de vegetac...

A partir de un estudio interdisciplinario sobre la participación sociopolítica en la formulación del Programa de Ordenamiento Ecológico Local (POEL) de Bacalar, analizamos las motivaciones y dificultades para considerar la "vocación natural” de este territorio, es decir, la capacidad que tiene para sustentar las actividades de los diversos seres vi...

This study addresses changes in the timing and intensity of precipitation from 1982 to 2016 from three meteorological stations around Calakmul, Mexico, a landscape balancing biodiversity conservation and smallholder agricultural production. Five methods were used to assess changes in precipitation: the Mann-Kendall test of annual and wet season tre...

Perceptions of climate change, the impacts of and responses to climatic variability and extreme weather are explored in three communities in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, in relation to livelihood resilience. These communities provide examples of the most common livelihood strategies across the region: small-scale fisheries (San Felipe) and semi-s...

The interplay among conservation, agricultural policy, and rainfall variability can intensify hardship for those practicing smallholder agriculture, especially in tropical developing countries. This article addresses these challenges as faced by the municipality of Calakmul, Mexico. Forty in-depth, semi-structured interviews with smallholders, gove...

Conservation focuses on environmental objectives, but neglecting social concerns can lead to feelings of injustice among some actors and thus jeopardise conservation aims. Through a case study on a biodiversity conflict around jaguar management in Southern Mexico, we explored actors' feelings of injustice and their associated determinants. We emplo...

In forest frontiers, smallholder agrarian livelihoods remain uneasily juxtaposed with conservation interests. Agricultural intensification is often considered a viable means of reconciling competing environmental and livelihood objectives given its potential to concentrate production on less land. However, intensification may have unintended conseq...

Human migration plays a critical role in numerous contemporary environmental concerns including global climate change and environmental justice. This review characterizes the ways migration is critical to contemporary human–environment geography. We delineate four themes from the literature based on (a) how migration affects the environment; (b) ho...

Agroecological transformation must often take place in degraded landscapes. Thus, ecological restoration and related fields may extend agroecology's reach. At the same time, agroecological practice may enhance ecological functions, contributing to ecosystem recovery in rural landscapes. The long-term impact of these initiatives will depend upon how...

Smallholders worldwide continue to experience processes of displacement from their lands under neoliberal political-economic governance. This displacement is often experienced as “slow”, driven by decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes that favor input-intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction and export projects...

In this paper we explore the depth dimension of agroecological scaling. Through interviews, focus groups and participant observation, we explore the link between agroecology and the recovery and maintenance of ecosystem functions through three case studies in peasant communities in southern Mexico. These communities have contrasting ecological, soc...

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la discriminación de jóvenes indígenas vendedores ambulantes en espacios públicos. A partir de una triangulación de métodos cualitativos y cuantitativos y de una revisión de datos censales de 2010, se analizan las experiencias de discriminación. Como resultado, se confirma que la discriminación, el acoso, la...

Analizamos los efectos discursivos y relacionales del proyecto piloto Reducción de Emisiones por Deforestación y Degradación (REDD+) en unidades domésticas con y sin derechos de acceso a la tierra en el ejido Felipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo. A partir de encuestas y entrevistas semiestructuradas, identificamos dispositivos que favorecen la adop...

Structural characteristics and dominance patterns in mangroves have been linked to environmental, anthropogenic and ecophysiological factors. The Soconusco on the southern coast of the Mexican Pacific is an environmentally heterogeneous region, with high availability of freshwater and different degrees of impact. The goal of this study was to analy...

Structural characteristics and dominance patterns in mangroves have been linked to environmental, anthropogenic and ecophysiological factors. The Soconusco on the southern coast of the Mexican Pacific is an environmentally heterogeneous region, with high availability of freshwater and different degrees of impact. The goal of this study was to analy...

In this chapter, we explore a central paradox in conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs aimed at women. Poverty relief programs aimed at women – including many CCTs and microfinance programs – attempt to address women’s socialmarginalization at the household and community levels on the premise that women’s lack of economic power contributes to po...

Research on Central American migration has revealed the importance of journeys to the global North for rural sending communities. The outcomes of south–south journeys to nearby countries are less explored, although they are commonplace. We examine Nicaraguan rural residents’ migration to other Central American countries, especially El Salvador, to...

Las formas de acceso a los recursos naturales del ejido, la distribución de los apoyos gubernamentales y el derecho sobre la tenencia de la tierra son problemas en el ejido mexicano que están asociados a políticas neoliberales. El artículo explora las diferentes formas de tensión y conflicto entre ejidatarios y pobladores de tres ejidos del municip...

Las formas de acceso a los recursos naturales del ejido, la distribución de los apoyos gubernamentales y el derecho sobre la tenencia de la tierra son problemas en el ejido mexicano que están asociados a políticas neoliberales. El artículo explora las diferentes formas de tensión y conflicto entre ejidatarios y pobladores de tres ejidos del municip...

Maize is an important staple crop in Mexico, and the recent intensification of climate variability, in combination with non-climatic forces, has hindered increases in production, especially for smallholder farmers. This article demonstrates the influence of these drivers on maize production trends in the three states of the Yucatan Peninsula using...

Conservation biology faces critical challenges that require collaborative approaches, including novel strategies to support interactions among actors in biodiversity conflicts. The goals of this study were to investigate the concept of common ground across multiple issues and to explore its practical application for the support of environmental man...

A failure to address social concerns in biodiversity conservation can lead to feelings of injustice among some actors, and hence jeopardize conservation goals. The complex socio-cultural and political context of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, Mexico, has historically led to multiple biodiversity conflicts. Our goal, in this case study, was to expl...

In this synthesis paper, the authors of this Special Section contribute towards a collective research and policy agenda on rural and indigenous women's forest and land rights in Latin America. Based on the key lessons from the empirical evidence, we map out a way forward for the research agenda and suggest a few key institutional and policy priorit...

Aquatic environments face a variety of threats in the Hondo River basin, Southeastern Yucatan Peninsula. Some of these impacts, like pollution by pesticides, may depend on land use and cover. Our objective was to assess the effect of land use/cover using a previously published index of biotic integrity (IBI), based on fishes and designed for shallo...

Objective: In this article, we analyzed the unwanted effects of government support programs as promoted by the Program of Social Inclusion Prospera, the Food Support Program (PAL), and the Strategic Program for Food Security (PESA) and the School Kitchen Program on smallholder food production and consumption patterns. Methodology: In 2015, we carri...

En general, se asume que estos programas -Programa de Inclusión Social PROSPERA, Programa de Apoyo Alimentario (PAL), Programa Estratégico para la Seguridad Alimentaria (PESA) y Cocinas Escolares-, tienen un impacto positivo en las poblaciones más vulnerables, que mejoran su alimentación y nutrición. Sin embargo, también se han impactado negativame...

Smallholder labor migration and its relationship to climate change adaptation has received increasing attention, with migration often represented either as part of successful adaptive livelihood diversification or as symptomatic of a lack of in-place adaptive capacity. Using a case study, we focus on the relationship between labor migration, agrari...

Food flow data provide unique insights into the debates surrounding the sustainability of land based production and consumption at multiple scales. Trade flows disguise the spatial correspondence of production and consumption and make their connection to land difficult. Two key components of this spatial disjuncture are land use displacement and ec...

Considerable research has examined the social, cultural, economic, and community benefits of urban gardening. Few studies, however, have empirically assessed factors that influence urban community garden agrodiversity or its relationship to these dimensions of gardening. We conducted an interdisciplinary study of agrodiversity and cultural identity...

We explore how Oportunidades, Mexico's anti-poverty conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, impacts production and gender dynamics in the smallholder agricultural sector. A 2010 household survey in one southeastern municipality (Calakmul) captured data on Oportunidades receipt, land use and yields, as well as gendered patterns of asset control, de...

Derived from a global climate change scenario, hurricane Stan (2005) severely impacted the Sierra Region of Chiapas and caused one of the largest internal displacements of people never seen before in the state. A portion of the population suffered a sudden relocation to nearby places amid improvised actions by public agencies, disregarding the inte...

We present an institutional ethnography and historical case study of the Vigía Chico fishing cooperative, located in the community of Punta Allen within the Biosphere Reserve of Sian Ka’an, México. The top producer of spiny lobster (Panulirus argus) in the state of Quintana Roo for over 30 years, this cooperative has been claimed as an example of a...

In many tropical forests, where phosphorus (P) is considered a limiting nutrient, atmospheric deposition can contribute significantly to available P. Previous studies have shown that P inputs from atmospheric deposition are enhanced by plant canopies. This effect is explained as the result of increased deposition of P-rich aerosol particles (dry de...

This book provides information relevant for the conservation of biodiversity and the sound management of the coastal and forest ecosystems of the Yucatan Peninsula in the face of global change. Various aspects of the biodiversity of the Yucatan Peninsula are analyzed in an integrative manner, including phenological, ecophysiological, ecological and...

Home to large tracts of biodiverse tropical forests, harboring valuable endemic species and carrying the spirit of its millennium Mayan culture, the Yucatán Peninsula is of high interest not only to ecologists, conservation biologists and social scientists, but to a wider audience interested in its biodiversity and conservation. The threats to biod...

This study explores the temporal and spatial variability and change in rainfall across southeastern Mexico and the mechanisms by which smallholder farmers adapt to this variability, especially droughts. Members of 150 households in 10 communities were interviewed to investigate adaptation strategies among swidden maize smallholders, linked to their...

The study reports on the relative abundance and habitat selection of Tapirus bairdii in the Calakmul and Balam Kú reserves in the state of Campeche, Mexico, in 3 sites along a humidity gradient in the Yucatan Peninsula, with rainfall and humidity increasing from north to south. A total of 120 km of linear transects were established where tapir trac...

This study investigates impacts and implications of recent landscape change in rural Mexico, through a case study in the Usumacinta Valley of eastern Chiapas. It addresses types of livelihood diversification strategies associated with changing land cover from 1984-2013, and the processes and roles that vary by actors and their scales of influence....

Se analizó la dinámica espacial de la cobertura de manglar en el humedal costero El Cabildo-Amatal- Gancho Murillo, Chiapas, México, determinando su impacto por procesos de fragmentación. El análisis de cambios demostró una pérdida de 509 ha de manglar en un período de 17 años y una tasa de deforestación anual del 1.05%. Las métricas estimadas indi...

In this paper, we examine how Mexico's 1992 counter-reforms reinforced social hierarchies between two ‘classes’ of residents within three ejidos in an agricultural frontier in Campeche. We carried out qualitative research with 94 ejidatarios, 92 pobladores and 13 government officials. Our research shows that the reforms cemented the second-class st...

The southern Yucatán (SY) has been recognized as a hotspot of biodiversity with great risk of deforestation. Land change analysis, based on classified Landsat TM and ETM + satellite imagery (1990, 2000 and 2006), was used to estimate the annual deforestation rates of 141 land management units of the SY, and spatial patterns of forest fragmentation...

In this chapter, we present evidence of two gendered agricultural asset shifts associated with labour out-migration in the municipality of Calakmul, Campeche. The first is a shift in land rights from men to women (wives), which occurred as men’s labour out-migration, largely to the U.S., coincided with the process of land privatisation and the refo...

Climatic variability, including droughts, has long affected the Mayan Lowlands. Therefore, farmers have developed coping strategies to mitigate these impacts. In the past, however, records of these effects and responses were largely anecdotal. In modern times, the perceptions of farmers, especially those practicing rain-fed agriculture, combined wi...

We describe conservation built on local expertise such that it constitutes a hybrid form of traditional and bureaucratic knowledge. Researchers regularly ask how local knowledge might be applied to programs linked to protected areas. By examining the production of conservation knowledge in southern Mexico, we assert local expertise is already centr...

Ecosystem management regularly requires bridging diverse cultural perspectives. As a result, researchers commonly assert that including local ecological knowledge in conservation strategies is essential to crafting enduring environmental solutions. Using the case of the king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa), we take preliminary steps in asking how ethno...

[1] For some phosphorus (P)-limited ecosystems, vegetation can be sustained by atmospheric P inputs. The ability of the canopy to trap airborne particles influences atmospheric P deposition. This dependence suggests a positive feedback, which could impact forest regeneration following deforestation. We examine how the amount of P deposited atmosphe...

This paper discusses transitions in land use evidenced by the case of the Suoi Muoi catchment area in NW mountain of Vietnam. Land use transitions were detected from LANDSAT and SPOT satellite images taken over the last 40 years. The maps showing changes in land use were linked with biophysical properties of the land such as slope gradient, elevati...

Over the last decades, political, economic and environmental pressures have encouraged changes from swidden to more intensive agricultural practices, resulting in the hypothesis that swidden cultivation systems are disappearing. In Calakmul, southeastern Mexico, communities decreased the area under milpa, the traditional maize swidden system, but a...

Tropical forests are increasingly subject to large-scale forest fires, which have become one of the greatest anthropogenic disturbances of these ecosystems. This study examines the relationship between forest fires and deforestation through an analysis of the impact of fires upon land-use decision-making at the household level and the impacts and p...

Based on research conducted in a migrant-sending community in south-eastern Mexico, we find that male out-migration has forced women to take on labour tasks which are associated with new spatial and mobility patterns. While these patterns have potential for increased empowerment for women, they also call the women’s morality into question, resultin...

This research examines the spatio-temporal trends in Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Global Inventory Modelling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series to ascribe land use change and precipitation to observed changes in land cover from 1982 to 2007 in the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, usin...

Hurricanes are common disturbances in the Caribbean, but their effect on carnivores is unknown. The objective of this study was to evaluate the occurrence and relative abundance of carnivores in relation with vegetation damage 18 months after Hurricane Dean (2007) hit the Yucatan Peninsula. Using camera–trapping, 4 sites showing different intensiti...

This study analyzes the spatial and temporal variability of precipitation across the Southern Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, addressing the anomalies and trends of annual and seasonal precipitation as well as the occurrence of meteorological droughts, using rainfall data from nine weather stations during the period 1953-2007. Linear regression in the...

Este estudio analiza la variabilidad espacial y temporal de la precipitación en el sur de la península de Yucatán, a través de anomalías y tendencias de la precipitación anual y estacional y la ocurrencia de sequías meteorológicas, empleando datos de lluvia de nueve estaciones meteorológicas para el periodo de 1953-2007. Utilizando tendencias de re...

This meta-analysis of land-cover transformations of the past 10–15 years in tropical forest-agriculture fronties world-wide shows that swidden agriculture decreases in landscapes with access to local, national and international markets that encourage cattle production and cash cropping, including biofuels. Conservation policies and practices also a...