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Ecology, Environment & Carbon Cycle
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Land Use of the Li-Speaking People in a Mountainous Area of Hainan Island, China: Impact of National Nature Reserve Established in 1986
Masahiro Umezaki
Section of International Health,
Graduate School of Tokyo Medical and Dental University
1-5-45 Yushima, Bunkyo, Tokyo 113-8519, Japan
Tel: (81)-3-5803-5188, Fax: (81)-3-3818-7176
Email: umezaki.ith@tmd.ac.jp
Japan
Krishna Pahari and Hong Wei Jiang
Department of Human Ecology,
School of International Health, University of Tokyo
7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Tel: (81)-3-5841-3608, Fax: (81)-3-5841-3395
Abstract
An IKONOS image for 2001 was used to produce a georeferenced map of land cover and land use for a Li-speaking village territory in mountainous areas of Hainan Island, China. The entire island of Hainan was established as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in 1988, when it became Hainan Province. Since then, it is one of most rapidly developing Provinces where large money has been invested to tourism development and cash cropping. The subject village is located on the foot of Mount Wushisan (the highest peak in the Island) where a national nature reserve was established and tourism development started in 1986. Indigenous subsistence of this village consisted of rice cultivation in the paddy fields, cultivation of rice and other crops in slush and burn fields, hunting animals, and gathering plants. Since the establishment of national reserve, however, subsistence activities that included burning, hunting, and gathering were placed under the ban. Instead, the government encouraged the people to plant cash crops
(e.g. banana, tea, and medicinal plants) for increasing the income level of the villagers. Also, the grasslands around the villages that were maintained as sources of buffalo fodder and roofing materials have changed to secondary growth because regular burning was stopped. In the present paper, we investigated whether IKONOS could supply (1) a land use map of the village territory that will be useful for anthropological research and (2) a map that shows the distribution of slush and burn gardens or grassland before the establishment of the national reserve. For the latter purpose, the people's knowledge --secondary growth dominated with Haname lidacea trees were the grassland in the past-- were used. Also, we could find several indicator trees in the secondary growth that evidence the existence of slush and burn gardens in the past. Locations of such trees were recorded in the field so as to be used as training data for the classification. The results showed that the land use map made with IKONOS was
sufficiently detailed and the past distribution of grassland could be identified, while identification of past slush and burn garden sites was not successful. High resolution satellite could provide useful information for anthropologists, though simplified analytical framework of satellite images should be presented for the utilization by non-professionals.
Introduction
For field scientists who study adaptation and survival of human beings, analysis of food production system is one indispensable research target. Particularly in these several decades, rapid population increase induced the degradation of food production systems in many regions and more attention has been paid to monitor the changing process (Umezaki et al., 2000). For instance, for the people who depend on rice cultivation, the land productivity and per capita area of paddy field are determinant factors of their food security or affluence. For the people who depend on shifting cultivation for their livelihood, location of the slush-and-burn gardens, area of potential gardens sites, and condition of secondary growth areas are the information needed for investigating their future sustainability of survival. The researchers, therefore, spending several months of their fieldwork period, measure the area of gardens (e.g., paddy field or slush-and-burn gardens), position them, and identify the owner of each,
using tape measure, compass, and angle meter. In this sense, development of remote sensing has contributed a lot to the analysis of land use and land cover, and thus that of food production system, in the target populations (Brondizio et al, 1994; Conant, 1990).
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