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We present a local-scale case study in the Rio Juma Settlement Project (RJSP) in Apuí, a deforestation hotspot in the southern portion of Brazil's state of Amazonas. We analyze land accumulation and land use strategies of households with a view to elucidating how their strategies are shaping deforestation. More than 76% of the household sample was from southern Brazil, and around 72% of them migrated to older expansion frontiers before reaching Apuí. The percentage of properties with legal land titles was up to five times less while land accumulation was much greater than reported for other settlement projects in Brazil. Land use change followed different patterns depending on whether the lot had been obtained with 100% forest cover or with inherited land use. Regression-tree analysis showed that the size of the cattle herd and the total area of the property do not always explain the area deforested, nor is the size of the deforested area necessarily related to productive activities. Lack of income obtained from livestock indicated that at least 30% of the cases studied were related to the speculative nature of land acquisition and deforestation. Increasing consolidation of land in larger, more highly capitalized ranches indicates the potential for high rates of deforestation in the future, even when the profitability of livestock is questionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper operationalizes the concept of highly optimized tolerance (HOT) for the case of smallholder agriculture in Rondônia, Brazil. It seeks to understand how characteristics of family farms shift as a function of property size, arguing that as production intensifies, properties move closer to a HOT state. In this state, resources are committed to maintaining robustness against expected disturbances, such as shifts in yields or crop prices, making property more vulnerable to other unexpected disturbances, such as shifts in input prices or availability. The shifts in production, labor, and costs that occur across scale in the Ji-Paraná River Basin in Rondônia were measured using a survey instrument on a sample of farmers in the basin. Study results show decreasing production intensity with increasing property size in the sample, coupled with decreasing contracted and family labor use intensity, as well as decreased income diversification and off-farm labor. Farms smaller than 60 ha in the sample differed markedly in production and cost structure from those that were larger. For these smaller properties, meeting the requirements of Rondônia's new environmental licensing program (LAPRO) may lead to an increase in the sale of land parcels to cover debts and a speeding up of land consolidation in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural development and climate change will be two of the major stressors on the Amazon natural-human system in the decades to come. Environmental licensing for rural properties is being implemented in several states in the Brazilian Amazon with the goal of restoring forests in agricultural landscapes and mediating the impacts of these stressors. This study presents an agent-based model of ranching and land exchange, informs it with empirical results from social research in the Ji-Paraná River Basin, Rondônia, Brazil, and investigates the social, economic, and environmental outcomes that can be expected as a result of environmental licensing in the context of climate change. Model results informed by these data suggest that although an environmental licensing scheme with monitoring and enforcement may increase the level of forested land in ranching landscapes, it may do so at the expense of the small producer. To the extent that effective monitoring and enforcement exist, a focus on larger holdings will help to mediate this negative social impact. These results suggest that a middle ground can be found in cases where current environmental goals conflict with legacies of past colonization and resource-use regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the strategies to promote sustainable tropical forest development around the world, the Federal Extractive Reserve System of Brazil is widely cited as an exemplary model. It is designed to protect rubber tapper communities, their forests, and their livelihoods while preventing deforestation and conserving biodiversity. In response to changing markets and policies, rubber tappers in the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve have recently diversified production to include market agriculture and cattle production, precipitating deforestation in the reserve, with the implication of increased ecological degradation compared to the extraction of nontimber forest products (NTFPs). Our remote sensing and forest inventory analyses yield different insights about the environmental consequences of distinct land-use mixes in two extractive communities, one of which emphasizes cattle and the other, NTFPs. Remote sensing results show a predictably greater impact on forest cover in the cattle-oriented community. This preliminary study is based on nested household- and community-level forest inventory and biodiversity analyses in two communities. Surprisingly, we found higher tree biodiversity in the rubber trail forests of the cattle-oriented community, and significantly lower tree species richness, tree density, total basal area, and number of trees of commercial size in the same land-use unit in the NTFP-focused community. Land-use surveys indicate lower levels of game consumption and hunting in the cattle-oriented community, and strong support for the development of sustainable timber extraction in both communities. The distinct type and degree of forest impact in the two communities exposes the problem of single-impact assessment as the sole means of performance and categorical land-use prohibitions as an effective mode of regulation in conservation areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the contexts of globalization and the Atlantic Forest ecoregion, I present a multiscale analysis of anthropogenic landscape dynamics in the Florianópolis city-region, Santa Catarina, southern Brazil. Drawing on field research conducted between 2000 and 2004 and a review of the literature, I examined Brazilian demographic and agricultural census data for the period of 1970 to 1995-1996. I hypothesized that economic restructuring, new institutional arrangements, and the valuation of environmental amenities and ecosystem services have contributed to forest recovery trends and thus a forest transition in the city-region. My results indicate that along with rapid urbanization, in-migration, socioeconomic polarization, and segregation, the city-region has experienced the contraction of private agricultural land area, expansion of protected areas, recovery of forests, and conversion of coastal plain ecosystems to built environments. Future analyses of forest transition dynamics should consider the spatial configurations of socioeconomic inequality in city-regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation in densely settled biodiversity hotspots often requires setting up reserve networks that maintain sufficient contiguous habitat to support viable species populations. Because it is difficult to secure landholder compliance with a tightly constrained reserve network design, attention has shifted to voluntary incentive mechanisms, such as purchase of conservation easements by reverse auction or through a fixed-price offer. These mechanisms carry potential advantages of transparency, simplicity, and low cost. However, uncoordinated individual response to these incentives has been assumed incompatible with the conservation goal of viability, which depends on contiguous habitat and biodiversity representation. We model such incentives for southern Bahia in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, one of the biologically richest and most threatened global biodiversity hotspots. Here, forest cover is spatially autocorrelated and associated with depressed land values, a situation that may be characteristic of longsettled areas with forests fragmented by agriculture. We find that in this situation, a voluntary incentive system can yield a reserve network characterized by large, viable patches of contiguous forest, and representation of subregions with distinct vegetation types and biotic assemblages, without explicit planning for those outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]