Complex Interactions Between Biodiversity and Indigenous Amazonian Cultures

The 300 to 500 million indigenous peoples of the world represent 5000 distinct ethnic groups and occupy 20% of the world's land surface. Indigenous peoples occupy or hold title to 26% of the Amazon Basin, broadly defined to include the Orinoco watershed. This is equivalent to the land extension currently designated as category I-IV protected areas, and proposed biodiversity conservation corridors include extensive areas of indigenous land. Although there is evidence that in the Amazon officially titled indigenous territories are more effective that protected areas at preventing forest clearing, there is also evidence that as indigenous peoples become sedentary and integrate with national socio-economic systems, they exert unsustainable pressure on vertebrate game animals. Such overexploitation appears to be a consequence of complex interactions between indigenous resource-use practices, a growing population, adoption of new technologies, and direct and indirect influences from the surrounding non-indigenous landscape (roads, cities, markets, wage employment, agribusiness, etc.).  Traditionally, the discussion of the role of indigenous lands in conservation has been a balance between human rights and biodiversity conservation. Taking a coupled natural-human system approach to these lands offers a different perspective and possibly different management solutions. Vertebrate game animals have been persistently hunted in these regions for millennia, and continue to provide an irreplaceable source of protein for indigenous populations. These animals form part of complex spiritual systems that govern human interactions with other different elements of the natural environment.  In a linked system, non-human vertebrate abundance and diversity patterns may reflect long-term human use patterns and spiritual belief systems.  Changes in one component of this system should lead to a response by the other. We describe spatial patterns of vertebrate biodiversity and abundance for the North Rupununi region of Guyana, South America, relate them to cultural practices of indigenous peoples over an approximately 48,000 km sq. area, and consider the implications of our results for other tropical areas.