Iona Fairlight Hawken
Advisors: Stephen Kellert and Charles Peters
Urban Jungle: Urbanization, Land-Use Change, and Landscape Transformation in Amazonia
Urbanization is an increasingly rapid and large-scale worldwide phenomenom that is changing the relationship between humans and the non-human natural environment. By concentrating human populations, services, and markets, cities streamline economic, social and institutional human activity, while also impacting non-urban areas through increased market reliance on external land-based production. Land-use change is recognized to have the greatest human impact on natural ecosystems worldwide, and urbanization as a category of land-use change is considered to be one of the greatest threats to biodiversity. However, the direct area of land-use change represented by cities does not account for the indirect land-use change from urbanization. It is unclear how human organization in urban areas shifts the impacts of humans on the natural environment, if other factors such as population are held constant. The essential question remains: with regards to tropical biodiversity and ecosystem function, and with population size held constant, is it better to place people in cities or in the countryside? Urbanization is currently proceeding most rapidly along frontiers of resource extraction, in particular, in areas of high biodiversity and conservation interest such as the Amazon Basin; thus it is critical to understand how urban factors influence rural land-use change in these areas. This proposed dissertation research will investigate how urbanization factors impact land-use, how urbanization factors impact environmental values, and what are the ecological consequences of these urban-driven land-use changes. This research will examine land-use change on an urban-rural gradient by quantitatively and qualitatively measuring and comparing: the production, consumption and marketing of rural forest products; the impacts of these land-use changes on plant and vertebrate communities; and the values and attitudes of humans toward non-human nature. The proposed project will examine land-use among more and less urbanized human populations in the municipality of the Puerto Maldonado and the surrounding area in the department of Madre de Dios in lowland Peruvian Amazonia. This region is characterized by high biodiversity and conservation interest, as well as increased development and immigration as plans to pave a highway connecting the Amazon Basin to the Andes are implemented. The results of this study will have implications for resource management, sustainable development, conservation policy, and urban and rural governance and planning. The data from this study will inform strategies to mitigate any adverse effects and enhance any positive effects of urban development on natural environmental quality, and enhance rather than deteroriate the realtionship between humans and non-human nature. This will be the first study of its kind in the Western Amazon basin.
