Ethnoecology, Resource Use, Conservation And Development In A ...

establish themselves in the secondary forest that eventually takes over old farms. In
the cases of several of the species reported to be common in fallows, this is the
mechanism reported to be responsible (chapter 6.4). Again, biological research
methods would allow it to be determined whether this is indeed the case. On the
other hand, if human exploitation of fruit reduces its availability to animal consumers,
it is possible that this could negatively affect their populations, or cause them to
migrate from areas impoverished in food trees as a result of human activity. This may
be most pronounced when trees are felled to obtain the fruit, and similar ecological
effects can result from other human uses of trees which involve their felling.
Intuitively, it seems most likely that this would negatively affect the densities of the
tree species involved, due to the wide interindividual distances between conspecifics
in tropical forest habitats with high floral diversity, and the high probability that the
gap created will eventually be filled by individuals of different species. On the other
hand, in many cases the understorey beneath a canopy tree will be dominated by its
offspring, leading to a high probability that felling the tree will lead to its replacement
by a conspecific. Where trees are found in monospecific stands of any great size,
population thinning may have positive effects on overall growth and fruit production.
These postulated scenarios, and the consequences for the behaviour, density and
potential harvest of game animals, again represent alternative hypotheses amenable
to discrimination by the use of biological research methods.
A subset of the ethnoecological data collected in the present study has thus
been employed to generate a series of specific, testable hypotheses about human
effects on the natural environment. All of these are in some way relevant to
considerations of management of local ecosystems, reconciling various human uses
and extendible, in principle, to criteria based purely on conservation of biodiversity
and community structure. The utility of ethnoecological knowledge in this respect has
been to allow attention to be drawn to potential conflicts between direct human uses
and the needs of economically or ecologically important animal species.
8.3 Ecological research as applied ethnoecological knowledge
The analysis presented in the previous chapter demonstrates the utility of
ethnoecological knowledge as a component of a methodology for investigating the
ecological consequences of activities associated with human subsistence. The
practical skills associated with human exploitation of natural resources are also
sufficiently flexible to be applied to other contexts. In the present study, several
people who had worked as informants in the ethnoecological component of the