title: Resilience and Alternative Stable States of Tropical Forest Landscapes under Shifting Cultivation Regimes.
abstract: Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecological model and implement it with literature-derived ecological parameters for six shifting cultivation landscapes from three continents. Analyzing the model with the tools of dynamical systems analysis, we show that such landscapes exhibit two stable states, one characterized by high forest cover and agricultural productivity, and another with much lower values of these traits. For some combinations of agricultural pressure and ecological parameters both of these states can potentially exist, and the actual state of the forest depends critically on its historic state. In many cases, the landscapes' 'ecological resilience', or amount of forest that could be destroyed without shifting out of the forested stability domain, declined substantially at lower levels of agricultural pressure than would lead to maximum productivity. A measure of 'engineering resilience', the recovery time from standardized disturbances, was independent of ecological resilience. These findings suggest that maximization of short-term agricultural output may have counterproductive impacts on the long-term productivity of shifting cultivation landscapes and the persistence of forested areas.
authors.affiliation: Risk, Policy and Vulnerability Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; Centre for Systems Solutions, Wroclaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Piotr
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Magnuszewski
authors.affiliation: Risk, Policy and Vulnerability Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; Department of statistics, Wroclaw University Of Economics, Wroclaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Katarzyna
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ostasiewicz
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, United States of America.
authors.forename: Robin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Chazdon
authors.affiliation: Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America; Ecosystem Services and Management Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; Southern Swedish Forest Research Center, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden.
authors.forename: Carl
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Salk
authors.affiliation: Risk, Policy and Vulnerability Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria; Centre for Systems Solutions, Wroclaw, Poland; Department of Mathematical Economics, Wroclaw University of Economics, Wroclaw, Poland.
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pajak
authors.affiliation: Risk, Policy and Vulnerability Program, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sendzimir
authors.affiliation: Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
authors.forename: Krister
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Andersson
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D065928:Forests; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological; D014329:Tropical Climate