Shane Scaggs

• Applied Anthropology, M.S.
• Research Associate at The Ohio State University

Purpose: Swidden agriculture is one of the most significant agricultural developments in human history and it has major ecological implications for the structure of the landscapes where it is practiced, yet it has long been theorized to be a primary cause of deforestation. Few studies have explored the structure of swidden mosaics and its relations...

Swidden (aka “slash-and-burn”) agriculture is a prototypical coupled human and natural system and understanding the social, cultural, and environmental factors shaping the trajectories of swidden forests is essential to mitigate climate change and ensure equitable collaboration between scientists, planners, and Indigenous communities. Despite this,...

Across the planet, Indigenous societies control, use, and manage large tracts of tropical forest that are crucial for combating climate change. Here we investigate whether customary Indigenous agricultural practices can increase forest species diversity using swidden (aka, slash-and-burn) agriculture. We examine the community lands surrounding two...

To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while neverth...

Objective: Food insecurity is a significant and growing concern undermining the wellbeing of 30% of the global population. Food in/security is a complex construct consisting of four dimensions: availability, access, utilization, and stability, making it challenging to measure. We provide a toolkit human biologists/ecologists can use to advance res...

Humanity faces a number of wicked problems, from global climate change and the coronavirus pandemic to systemic racism and widening economic inequality. Since such complex and dynamic problems are plagued by disagreement among stakeholders over their nature and cause, they are notoriously difficult to solve. This commentary argues that if humanity...

Background: Although anthropogenic climate change poses existential challenges for Indigenous communities in the Arctic, these challenges are not entirely unprecedented. Over many generations, Arctic peoples have developed a wide range of behavioral strategies to navigate environmental change and uncertainty, and these strategies provide a foundat...

We investigated the coupled social and ecological dynamics of swidden agriculture through a common property resource field experiment framed as a game with realistic social norms and ecological dynamics. We tested the hypothesis that community social norms related to labor reciprocity and graduated sanctioning may encourage sustainable swidden cult...

Land tenure systems vary considerably across forager societies. The economic defensibility model explains this variation by considering the costs and benefits of defending resources that vary in density and predictability. The purpose of our study was to describe and explain the variation in tenure systems across 30 hunter-gatherer societies from a...

Small group learning activities have been shown to improve student academic performance and educational outcomes. Yet, we have an imperfect understanding of the mechanisms by which this occurs. Group learning may mediate student stress by placing learning in a context where students have both social support and greater control over their learning....

Philanthropic giving is a classic example of prosociality. Important for funding charitable and not-for-profit organizations, research on philanthropic giving is particularly relevant as competition for donors has increased in recent years. This chapter investigates the influence of social cues on philanthropic solicitation using one-shot anonymous...

A poster that lays out our research plan for dissecting harvest diversity in Alaska social networks during an era of change and uncertainty.