Happy New Year!
With a new year comes a move to the University of Sheffield, where I will take up a post-doctoral fellowship with Sheffield’s new Institute for International Development. My time at the Agroecology and Urban Ecosystems Lab at WSU has been fun and productive, and I have made many new friends with whom to share ideas with in the last year – my move to Sheffield is certainly not a good bye!
My work in Brazil has been thought provoking and has expanded my views about the chain of events and the internal processes linking policies to livelihoods and conservation outcomes. My aim is to make sure that these views are reflected in the publications that will come out from the work we did in the last year (so watch this space!).
the paper which has been published today in Conservation Letters is the final work to come out from my PhD and you can downloaded here (http://tinyurl.com/b7dle8p):
Evaluating the effects of common-pool resource institutions and market forces on species richness and forest cover in Ecuadorian indigenous Kichwa communities
We compare conservation outcomes between a protected area (PA) and four indigenous common-property regimes (CPRs) under differing degrees of market integration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. We first assess how market forces and common-pool resource institutions governing processes of forest conversion affect biodiversity and forest cover, and whether institutions mitigate the effect of market forces. We then analyze how biodiversity and forest cover differ between a PA, and communities with different market access. Finally, we link biodiversity and forest cover changes within communities to differences in land-use practices. While we show similar levels of forest cover and biodiversity between the PA and large CPRs with little access to local markets, institutions appear not to attenuate market effects on conservation outcomes in our case studies. We discuss results within a common-property theory context and highlight the importance of disentangling how market integration, common-pool resource institutions, and resource health interact over time.
Beginning to End Hunger 