Subsistence vs. Logging: How Is the Presence of One Ecosystem Service Favored over the Other in a Landscape?

The landscapes of most tropical regions have been shaped by the indigenous peoples’ and their livelihood practices. The utility of plants within these landscapes for traditional purposes has been facing intense competition from commercial logging. To gain insights into this conflict, this paper examined how landscape conditions may influence the presence and spatial distribution of indigenous subsistence and commercial logging ecosystem services relative to one another. Data on the ecosystem services and landscape conditions in the form of physical environment variables were obtained for twelve indigenous villages in the Rupununi, Southern Guyana. For each village, the relative log risk ratios of subsistence values to logging values were computed and regressed against six physical environment variables – village presence, distance to village, distance to road, distance to waterways, elevation, and slope – to examine if and how landscape conditions may favor the presence of one service over the other. The estimates were then used to map the relative differences in the spatial distributions of subsistence and commercial logging services in each village. It was found that mean relative log risk ratios for the villages were generally positive, indicating an inclination towards the presence of subsistence services. However, the maps revealed that while some areas within a given village were indeed more favorable for the presence of subsistence services, other areas within the same village were inclined towards the presence of logging services. Similar spatial analyses can be explored to guide policy-makers in developing land-use strategies that allocate forest lands between competing users by identifying areas that are best suited for indigenous peoples’ subsistence activities and for commercial logging operations.