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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural resource management of complex, adaptive socioecosystems requires a mix of good practice, policy, science, and intuition. We report here on a rapid and low-cost experiment in Lower Silesia, Poland, using modeling techniques to explore the potential to develop local ecological products. We focus our analysis on one particular group of products related to an ‘ancient’ breed of chicken, the green-legged hen (GLH), with low resource requirements that could support a sustainable agriculture based on lower use of fertilizers and pesticides. The issues affecting farmers' commitment to adopt GLHs include availability of EU subsidies, the supportive role of NGOs, cooperation between producers, and uncertainty about the future profitability of a relatively untested product. We used this model to evaluate alternative scenarios, nurture the discussion among farmers, and stimulate them to take appropriate action. Gaming with a microworld interface was a crucial breakthrough experience for the farmers to accept and understand the scientific language and methods, and to join the community discussion by actively contributing to improving the model. This positive experience could be a crucial initial step toward the transition from intensive to extensive farming methods, thereby increasing the resilience of natural resource-based rural economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]