Assistant Professor David Carr has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Career Development Award, K01. The Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) supports career development in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical sciences. K01 awardees typically possess a research or a health-professional doctorate and have demonstrated the potential for highly productive independent research. The candidate must identify a mentor with extensive research experience, and candidates must dedicate a minimum of 75 percent effort conducting research and developing research skills during the award period. Carr applied for the award to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Population Research Division. Funding for the research project, Migration, Demographic Factors, and Deforestation in Guatemala, provides support for a Research Assistant and covers Carr’s research and travel expenses, summer salary, and 50% of his UCSB salary. The award period is 6/1/05-5/31/10 with a total dollar amount of $486,518. UCSB Geographers Mike Goodchild and Dar Roberts serve as research mentors on the award.
Carr explains that the rapid human-induced destruction of the planet’s vegetation cover during the past century, particularly through agricultural clearing, has been the most striking footprint of human occupation on the earth’s surface. Since most deforestation in Latin America (and probably the world) occurs at the hands of agricultural and pastoral colonists, frontier settlement is a driving force behind much of the continued elimination of tropical forests. Yet, in explaining variability in forest clearing, scholars of human dimensions of environmental change have focused almost exclusively on in situ resource use, while virtually all research on migration in the developing world examines rural-urban migration and trans-national migration and is therefore only peripherally relevant to deforestation. To date, no land use/land cover change (LUCC) research has explicitly examined the relation between rural-rural migration and forest cover change.
The objective of the project is to investigate the primary proximate and underlying demographic forces behind deforestation in Guatemala’s agricultural frontier region, the vast departamento (similar to a US state) of Petén. Central America’s forests were felled more swiftly than in any other world region over the previous decade. Yet, while a burgeoning literature has examined settler land use and forest clearing in South America, the proposed study takes advantage of the only large, detailed survey on population and land use in a frontier region in Central America, where biophysical, socio-political, and demographic processes are distinct from the South American frontier context. The proposed research addresses several other shortcomings in current frontier LUCC research. First, while population is considered a major driver of global deforestation, accounting for approximately half or more of the worldwide deforestation variance, few studies have successfully found such links at the household level where population and land use decision are ultimately made. Further, despite the fact that interfacing multiple spatial and temporal scales has been identified as a major priority in human dimensions of global change, few researchers have incorporated multi-scale factors leading to forest conversion in a spatially explicit model. Lastly, no studies have compared differences in land use relating to forest conversion on emerging frontiers relative to more developed frontier regions. The proposed project will address these deficiencies in current demographic and environmental change research to examine settler land use impacts on deforestation in Petén’s agricultural frontiers as well as explore factors relating to out-migration to the frontier from migrant source areas.
