Suchergebnisse

The Government of Madagascar is trying to reduce deforestation and conserve biodiversity through creating new protected areas in the eastern rainforests. While this has many benefits, forest use restriction may bring costs to farmers at the forest frontier. We explored this through a series of surveys in five sites around the Corridor Ankeniheny Zahamena new protected area and adjacent national parks. In phase one a stratified random sample of 603 households completed a household survey covering demographic and socio-economic characteristics, and a choice experiment to estimate the opportunity costs of conservation. A stratified sub-sample (n = 171) then completed a detailed agricultural survey (including recording inputs and outputs from 721 plots) and wild-harvested product survey. The data have been archived with ReShare (UK Data Service). Together these allow a deeper understanding of the household economy on the forest frontier in eastern Madagascar and their swidden agricultural system, the benefits households derive from the forests through wild-harvested products, and the costs of conservation restrictions to forest edge communities.

Humanity's impact on the environment is increasing, as are strategies to conserve biodiversity, but a lack of understanding about how interventions affect ecological and conservation outcomes hampers decision-making. Time series are often used to assess impacts, but ecologists tend to compare average values from before to after an impact; overlooking the potential for the intervention to elicit a change in trend. Without methods that allow for a range of responses, erroneous conclusions can be drawn, especially for large, multi-time-series datasets, which are increasingly available. Drawing on literature in other disciplines and pioneering work in ecology, we present a standardised framework to robustly assesses how interventions, like natural disasters or conservation policies, affect ecological time series. ; HSW was supported by the Cambridge Trust Poynton Scholarship, Cambridge Department of Zoology J.S. Gardiner Studentship and Cambridge Philosophical Society; TA was supported by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT180100354) and the University of Queensland strategic funding; JG was supported by European Union's Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie program (No. 706784) and VILLUM FONDEN (VKR023371); BIS was supported by a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Research Fellowship; WJS is funded by Arcadia and JPGJ was supported by the Leverhulme Trust: RPG-2014-056.