ABSTRACT
Urbanization has threatened rural communities' livelihoods worldwide, changing their agro-food systems from locally produced traditional items to industrialized foodstuffs. The main objective was to investigate the relationship between livelihood conditions and the agro-food transition process in rural communities of the Center-West, Northeast, and Amazon regions of Brazil. We hypothesized that traditional agroecosystems and local food habits changed with greater access to market economies. The study was conducted with semi-structured questionnaire interviews to verify agro-food patterns, subsistence farming, natural resource use, and socioeconomic conditions. Moreover, we used stable isotope ratios from the inhabitants' fingernails to determine the food source and trophic chain diversity. Data from questionnaires were analyzed using a Bayesian clustering model to characterize the socioeconomic conditions and agro-food patterns among rural and urban communities. The isotopic data were appraised through a nonparametric model to assess food differences among Brazilian regions and different community types. The Bayesian model allowed us to determine the optimal number of groups according to descriptive socioeconomic and agro-food variables sorted by each specific location. We also verified a food change from C3 (more natural) to C4 (more processed) with an increase in δ 13C and a decrease in δ 15N in the city and town localities. This indicates a livelihood shift from locally produced foods to processed items toward urban areas. Although remote villages showed more maintenance of their agro-food systems, increased access to market economies and the supermarket diet is changing the livelihood conditions of rural communities, which can compromise their traditional farming and food sovereignty.
ABSTRACT
Building conservation units has been an important tool to minimize the loss of biodiversity. However, the allocation of these units need to be optimized to preserve the greatest number of species, under a series of socioeconomics restrictions that include the road network effect on biodiversity. An optimization process was made by using the simulated annealing algorithm, available on program SITES 1.0, to model a set of data on the distribution of 131 species of anuran amphibians occuring in Cerrado, distributed in 181 cells with 1º of spatial resolution. This study shows a couple of conservation units networks in Brazilian Cerrado, one of them based on the concept of complementarity and another on the distribution of roads. This paper points out the most important sites to create conservation units, attempting to preserve anuran amphibians from Cerrado and the places that should protect all anuran species spread on this biome, along the roads length. The results suggest that both networks should be used to combine conservation plans and human development, evaluated by means of road network.
A criação de unidades de conservação tem sido uma importante ferramenta para minimizar a perda de biodiversidade. Entretanto, a alocação destas unidades deve ser otimizada de forma que possam preservar o maior número de espécies sob uma série de restrições sócio-econômicas, as quais incluem o efeito da malha rodoviária sobre a biodiversidade. Utilizando um conjunto de dados sobre a distribuição de 131 espécies de anfíbios Anuros no bioma Cerrado, distribuídos em 181 células (1º de latitude e 1º de longitude), um processo de otimização foi feito através do algoritmo simulated annealing, disponível no programa SITES 1.0. O presente estudo apresenta duas redes de unidades de conservação para o Cerrado, uma baseada no conceito de complementaridade e a outra na distribuição de rodovias. Elas indicam, respectivamente, as localidades mais importantes para a criação de unidades de conservação e os locais onde deve existir uma unidade de conservação para que todas as espécies de anuros com ocorrência neste Bioma sejam preservadas, levando em consideração a extensão rodoviária. Estes resultados sugerem a utilização de ambas as redes para que haja sinergismo entre projetos de conservação e desenvolvimento humano, medido através da malha viária.
