Elsevier

Applied Geography

Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2006, Pages 96-112
Applied Geography

People within parks—forest villages, land-cover change and landscape fragmentation in the Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, India

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2005.11.002Get rights and content

Abstract

There has been extensive debate on the conservation impact of people located within protected areas. In a tiger reserve in central India, we find that the densely populated villages located outside the park boundary are better connected to regional markets by road networks, and are associated with greater deforestation rates and more forest fragmentation compared to the more isolated villages in the park interior. The park itself however appears well protected in terms of forest cover and connectivity. Instead of focusing on resettlement of forest villages, forest protection needs may be better served by working with these surrounding communities to develop alternate mechanisms for income generation.

Introduction

Deforestation in the tropics is a major driver of global environmental change, with significant consequences in store for global climate, biodiversity, and the maintenance of a range of ecosystem services (Geist & Lambin, 2002; Rindfuss, Walsh, Turner, Fox, & Mishra, 2004). A variety of mechanisms have been put in place to curtail and manage these transformations, of which the establishment of protected area networks has been perhaps one of the most visible. By the end of the 20th century, over 100,000 protected area reserves had been established across the world, covering about 9% of the Earth's land surface (Green & Paine, 1997). This expansion has been especially rapid in the past few decades, with protected areas now viewed as one of the last remaining bastions of refuge against an almost unstoppable tide of deforestation.

In South Asia, where tropical forests coexist with some of the highest densities of human populations in the world, most forested areas are found in human-dominated landscapes, and most protected areas are embedded in landscapes that have been inhabited by humans for millennia (Gadgil & Guha, 1992). As with other regions of the world, the strict exclusionary policies that were adopted by most parks, when combined with a generally unsympathetic administration, exacerbated park–people conflicts—giving rise to problems for local communities as well as for park administrators (Agrawal & Ostrom, 2001; McLean & Straede, 2003). Biodiversity continued to be lost at a rapid pace despite extensive efforts to curtail habitat degradation.

By the early 1990s, awareness of these problems had led to a change in policies, with an increasing emphasis on involving local communities with forest management through community forestry and co-management initiatives (Agrawal & Ostrom, 2001; Poffenberger & McGean, 1996). These approaches, although strong on rhetoric, remain limited in practice (Agrawal, Britt, & Kanel, 1999). Joint forest management and community forestry initiatives have strengthened and expanded in nonpark forests, and protected area policies are attempting to involve communities located at the park periphery in eco-development initiatives (Dinerstein, 2003; Nagendra et al., 2004). However, there remains significant debate within the forest departments of the region and international conservation agencies on the necessity, and indeed the wisdom of allowing local communities to engage with forest conservation within protected areas (Chapin, 2004; Wilshusen, Brechin, Fortwangler, & West, 2002). This thinking is reflected in the current global debate on protected area conservation, with a number of recent publications arguing that the demands of conservation and people are difficult to reconcile, and need to be separated for maximum effectiveness (Brandon, Redford, & Sanderson, 1998; Oates, 1999; Terborgh, 1999). There is thus a growing demand for the return of strict protection-based approaches to management in selected protected areas, especially those areas that have been set aside for large mammal protection (Liu et al., 2002; Seidensticker, Jackson, & Christie, 1999).

The subcontinent of India exemplifies these tensions between conservation and development. Between 1975 and 1998, the number of national parks in India increased from 5 to 85, and the number of wildlife sanctuaries increased from 126 to 448 (Ministry of Environment and Forests, 1998). Five percent of the country's land surface is currently under protection, largely located in areas of dense human populations. Thus, areas that are set aside as parks frequently contain settlements located within their boundaries. These communities find themselves subject to strict restrictions on the harvest of forest products that are significant component of their traditional livelihood. The process of park creation further puts these, often tribal, low-income villages, out of the scope of most development agencies, since development and infrastructure activities are not permitted within the park. Thus, in a somewhat paradoxical situation, even while attention has been paid to creating alternative sources of livelihood for communities located adjacent to the park boundary, the park villages that are most disadvantaged by park establishment are often left unaided.

An often perceived solution for dealing within the problems of people within parks is to resettle them outside the protected area (Ghate, 2003; McLean & Straede, 2003). In developing nations through the world, resettlement has been used frequently, with little regard for the social consequences and in some cases even for the long-term viability of the park (McElwee, 2001; McLean, 2000; West, 1994). Communities living within forests can be an essential component of forest conservation, by actively engaging with forest management activities and defending their territories against poachers and loggers (Schmidt-Soltau, 2003; Schwartzman, Moreira, & Nepstad, 2000). In order to determine whether such resettlement is in fact essential, we need to understand the extent to which people within parks impact the long-term viability of these regions. Empirical studies that evaluate the impact of park villages on land-use/land-cover change, forest fragmentation and forest recovery are essential if we are to develop a better understanding of these critical issues. Since park boundaries often form a barrier to markets and road infrastructure, villages within a park boundary often tend to be rather isolated from the market, and therefore more likely to collect forest products at a subsistence level of extraction, which may not severely impact the forest. This is in contrast to villages surrounding the park, where easy access to increasing market demand leads to forest extraction for sale, in addition to fulfilling domestic requirements.

Our first objective in this research is to evaluate the relative impact of interior park villages and external boundary villages (spatially contiguous, administratively defined units located on the topographic maps) on land-cover change and forest fragmentation in a tiger reserve in central India. Since the external villages are more connected to the regional markets by road networks, our hypothesis is that these villages are associated with greater deforestation rates and forest fragmentation when compared to the more isolated interior villages. Our second objective is to combine satellite image analyses with field information on the communities in this region to understand the human processes driving land-cover change in the dry tropical forests of central India, an area about which little is known in comparison to the better studied moist tropical forests of the region.

Section snippets

Study area

The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR) is situated in the Chandrapur district in the eastern part of Maharashtra state, between 20°4′53″ to 20°25′51″N and 79°13′13″ to 79°33′34″ E (Fig. 1). The TATR consists of a national park and wildlife sanctuary that extends over 625 km2, covering a landscape that is an interspersion of grasslands, water bodies and dry tropical deciduous forests along with patches of riparian forest alongside streams. Two main rivers drain the region, with the Erai river in

Remote sensing classification

Satellite image analysis when combined with localized information on land-use can be of great assistance in understanding the socio-economic and institutional processes that drive temporal changes in land-use and land-cover (Geoghegan et al., 1998; Rindfuss, Walsh, Turner, Fox, & Mishra, 2004). An assessment of land-cover change between 1989 and 2001 was conducted using Landsat TM satellite imagery acquired during 5 November 1989 and 29 October 2001. Both images were acquired during the dry

Changes in space

The individual classifications from 1989 and 2001 (Figs. 3a and b) depict the impact that the 53 surrounding villages have on the surrounding landscape. Where the density of village settlements is greatest, to the northeast and northwest sides, there is little forest area. This is also the region of the landscape where road network density is at a maximum. Towards the south, where the TATR is primarily surrounded by other categories of State owned protected forest, the forest cover is

Discussion

Although the levels of forest clearing within the areas accessed by park interior and surrounding villages appears roughly the same, our results indicate that forest fragmentation at the park periphery appears much greater than that emanating from the villages confined within the reserve. There are 53 villages on the periphery that utilize forest products from the TATR, which, owing to their greater human and cattle populations (Khawarey & Karnat, 1997), naturally have a much greater impact on

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant SBR-9521918 to the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change (CIPEC) at Indiana University, and the Society in Science: Branco Weiss fellowship to HN. We thank Deepshikha Mishra for her assistance with data collection, the Maharashtra Forest Department, in particular the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), the Project Director of Tadoba-Andhari

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