Describe with text and illustrations how ur locality has changed over 2 to 3 decades, includind changes in the way people dependent on local and global ecosystem services, land use, population,etc.
Answers
describes ongoing research that integrates social and natural science approaches to the study of interactions between development and environment in the Yaqui Valley region of southern Sonora, Mexico. While the focus of this project has evolved over the past 10 years, much of our research addresses three broad questions: (1) What drives land use and land management decisions? (2) What are the implications of these decisions for the people and ecosystems in the region, and for the regional and global environment? (3) What alternatives are available to the people of the region in order to harmonize development and environment? Our analysis draws from various disciplines, including agronomy, biogeochemistry, ecology, economics, geography, hydrology, international policy analysis, remote sensing science, and water resources engineering to address these questions at multiple points across the landscape.
In this chapter, we first present an introduction to the Yaqui Valley study region. We then outline several of the conceptual themes or frameworks that we have used to organize our study of the Yaqui system, all of which focus on the interaction of social and biophysical factors in the human-environment system. We briefly describe three broad studies—on agriculture–environment interactions, land use dynamics at the regional scale, and vulnerability—discussing the motivation for and results of the work as well as the multiple data sources and analytical techniques used in each. We include at the end of this section a brief discussion of the potential insights that could be gained from a more specific and focused analysis of human population dynamics. Finally, we discuss the lessons learned about integrative studies of the human-environment systems.