title: The role of ethnobotanical skills and agricultural labor in forest clearance: evidence from the Bolivian Amazon.
abstract: Research on the benefits of local ecological knowledge for conservation lacks empirical data on the pathways through which local knowledge might affect natural resources management. We test whether ethnobotanical skills, a proxy for local ecological knowledge, are associated to the clearance of forest through their interaction with agricultural labor. We collected information from men in a society of gatherers-horticulturalist, the Tsimane' (Bolivia). Data included a baseline survey, a survey of ethnobotanical skills (n = 190 men), and two surveys on agricultural labor inputs (n = 466 plots). We find a direct effect of ethnobotanical skills in lowering the extent of forest cleared in fallow but not in old-growth forest. We also find that the interaction between ethnobotanical skills and labor invested in shifting cultivation has opposite effects depending on whether the clearing is done in old-growth or fallow forest. We explain the finding in the context of Tsimane' increasing integration to the market economy.
authors.affiliation: Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. victoria.reyes@uab.cat
authors.forename: Victoria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Reyes-García
authors.forename: Unai
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Pascual
authors.forename: Vincent
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Vadez
authors.forename: Tomás
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Huanca
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D001838:Bolivia; D019448:Ethnobotany; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D014197:Trees