Traditional Subsistence Economies on Southwest Madagascar have Long-term Impacts on Ecological Productivity

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The environmental impacts of human societies are generally assumed to correlate with factors such as population size, whether they are industrialized, and the intensity of their landscape modifications (e.g., agriculture, urban development, etc.). As a result, small-scale communities with subsistence economies are often not the focus of long-term studies of environmental impact. Having a clear understanding of the ways different communities at different scales interact with and shape the environment can help us effectively support communities co-designing and maintaining sustainable relationships with their environments today. On Madagascar, ecological and cultural diversity provide a unique case study to examine the role of diverse socioeconomic practices (e.g., fishing, foraging, and herding) on long-term ecological (in)stability. In this study, we use high-resolution remote sensing datasets and machine learning to compare long-term ecological impacts of different human livelihood strategies in SW Madagascar. Our results indicate that while human-environmental dynamics between different socioeconomic communities are similar but these strategies can be identified in geophysical data using machine learning classifiers. Furthermore, we find that traditional ecological practices have become integrated into the very fabric of ecological systems in SW Madagascar and help serve roles in environmental resilience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40042.0