Management and motivations to manage “wild” food plants. A case study in a Mestizo village in the Amazon deforestation frontier

This study was conducted in a mestizo village in the Peruvian Amazon deforestation frontier

Abstract

Human management of anthropogenic environments and species is tightly linked to the ecology and evolution of plants gathered by humans. This is certainly the case for wild food plants, which exist on a continuum of human management. Given alarming deforestation rates, wild food plant gathering is increasingly occurring in anthropogenic ecosystems, where farmers actively manage these species in order to ensure their availability and access.

This study was conducted in a mestizo village in the Peruvian Amazon deforestation frontier, with the objective of documenting the management practices, including the human-induced movement of wild food plant species across the forest-agriculture landscape, and the motivations that farmers have to manage them using a qualitative ethnobotanical approach.

This research was supported by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme

Citation

Cruz-Garcia, G.S., Management and motivations to manage “wild” food plants. A case study in a Mestizo village in the Amazon deforestation frontier, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, vol.5, issue127, 2017

Management and motivations to manage “wild” food plants. A case study in a Mestizo village in the Amazon deforestation frontier

Published 1 October 2017