Functional Links Between Biodiversity, Livelihoods, and Culture in a Hani Swidden Landscape in Southwest China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The landscape of Mengsong, southwest China, was biologically diverse until recently due to historical biogeographical processes overlain by the swidden-cultivation practices of the Hani who migrated there several centuries ago.Our research sought to understand how the Hani adjusted their livelihoods to new policies, markets, and technologies, and the consequences for biodiversity conservation.We combined landscape, plot, and household surveys, interviews, and reviews of secondary documents, to reconstruct the major changes and responses to challenges in the social-ecological system over previous decades.Significant changes from closed to open canopy of secondary-forest vegetation took place between 1965-1993 and from open-canopy to closed-canopy forest between 1993-2006, mostly explainable by changes in state land-use policies and the market economy.Most remaining swidden-fallow succession had been converted into tea or rubber plantations.Swidden-fallow fields used to contain significant levels of biological diversity.Until 2000, biodiversity served several important ecological and social functions in the Hani livelihood system.Indigenous institutions were often functional, for example, linked to fire control, soil management, and watershed protection.For centuries, the Hani had detailed knowledge of the landscape, helping them to adjust rapidly to ecological disturbances and changes in production demands.The Hani understood succession processes that enabled them to carry out long-term land-management strategies.Recent government policies and market dynamics have simplified livelihoods and landscapes, seriously reducing biodiversity, but greatly increasing the area of closed-canopy forest (including plantations) and undermining the usefulness of Hani knowledge and land-use institutions.Meeting both conservation and development objectives in this landscape will require new functional links between sustainable livelihoods, culture, and biodiversity, rather than seeking to recreate the past.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".