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A Cultural Consensus Regarding the King Vulture?
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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 ethnoecology and field biology might be combined in conservation practice. The paper reports on a questionnaire applied to sixty-six local experts in southern Yucatán, home to Mexico’s largest expanse of tropical forest and the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. Local experts included forest workers, i.e. hunters, loggers, and gum tappers, some of whom worked as guides for field biologists. The research results point to the possibility of a cultural consensus among these experts regarding the bird’s natural history. After outlining this preliminary consensus and contrasting it with academic findings, the paper considers the implications of a consensus for conservation programming.
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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 regresión lineal anuales y estacionales se analizó el aumento o la disminución de las precipitaciones durante este periodo. Las anomalías de precipitación permitieron evaluar la estabilidad, el déficit o superávit de precipitación para cada año, y el método quintil permitió la clasificación de la intensidad de las sequías meteorológicas. Los resultados muestran una considerable variabilidad espacial y temporal, con mayores valores de precipitación y anomalías en la costa, que van disminuyendo gradualmente hacia el Centro-Oeste del área en estudio. Durante este periodo hay una disminución de la precipitación anual y de la estación húmeda, en gran parte de la zona la cual alcanza una disminución de 12 mm anuales (estación Chachobben). Estaciones como Zoh Laguna Campeche muestran claramente un aumento en los años de sequía (desde leve hasta extrema) a partir de 1985 principalmente. Este estudio contribuye a un major conocimiento de la variación regional de la precipitación y sus posibles vínculos con el Cambio Climático a escala regional y global.
We studied nesting King Vultures (Sarcoramphus papa) between October 2001 and April 2003. The study was accomplished at a private reserve belonging to CAUAIA's farm, situated in Matozinhos, Minas Gerais, inside of APA CARSTE environmental protection area of Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais. Incubation occurred in October and November 2001, and the development of the nestling lasted from late November 2001 to early in April 2002. The nest was located in a fissure 44 m above ground of a 70 m calcareous quarry. A single egg was found in the nest: it was white and measured 95.6 mm x 63.6 mm. The nestling left the nest 130 days after hatching. We collected eight pieces of finger bones of young oxen (Carpicus unaris).
This highly topical study of tropical deforestation reports on the first phase of a large, integrated, multi- institutional, and team-based study. Based in Mexico, it is designed to understand and project land changes in a development frontier that pits the rapidly growing needs of smallholder farmers to cut down forests for cultivation against federally sponsored initiatives committed to various international programs of forest preservation and complementary economic programs.
In recent years, the field of study variously called local, indigenous or traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) has experienced a crisis brought about by the questioning of some of its basic assumptions. This has included reassessing notions that scientific methods can accurately elicit and describe TEK or that incorporating it into development projects will improve the physical, social or economic well-being of marginalized peoples. The contributors to this volume argue that to accurately and appropriately describe TEK, the historical and political forces that have shaped it, as well as people's day-to-day engagement with the landscape around them must be taken into account. TEK thus emerges, not as an easily translatable tool for development experts, but as a rich and complex element of contemporary lives that should be defined and managed by indigenous and local peoples themselves.
How can the international conservation movement protect biological diversity, while at the same time safeguarding the rights and fulfilling the needs of people, particularly the poor? Contested Nature argues that to be successful in the long-term, social justice and biological conservation must go hand in hand. The protection of nature is a complex social enterprise, and much more a process of politics, and of human organization, than ecology. Although this political complexity is recognized by practitioners, it rarely enters into the problem analyses that inform conservation policy. Structured around conceptual chapters and supporting case studies that examine the politics of conservation in specific contexts, the book shows that pursuing social justice enhances biodiversity conservation rather than diminishing it, and that the fate of local peoples and that of conservation are completely intertwined.