Abstract
Context
Landscape domestication (LD) has been an important mechanism for subsistence in traditional rural societies. In the last decade, important theoretical advances have been accomplished with valuable archaeological, historical, and ecological approaches for understanding LD processes, while integrated spatial approximations are still scanty.
Objectives
To assess the usefulness of species distribution modeling for addressing LD processes associated with human influence on plant community distribution, using as case study the palm-stands of Brahea dulcis in central-southern Mexico.
Methods
We used MaxEnt for building distribution models, including social factors as triggers of palm-stand distribution, and environmental variables as covariates. Model performance, predicted surface and variable importance were statistically evaluated. The best distribution model was chosen, and it was further assed by visual inspection and ground-truth validation to contrasts predicted versus observed palm-stand distribution.
Results
Social factors contributed the most to the model fit, proving to be strongly associated with palm-stand presence. Visual inspection of the predicted spatial distribution resulted coherent with observed palm-stand distribution. Ground-truth proved to reach a certainty of circa 80% between predicted and observed areas with palm-stands.
Conclusions
Ethnic identity, distance to roads, and land tenure were the strongest explanatory variables to accurately predict the observed palm-stand spatial distribution. This revealed the high importance of social factors for palm-stand presence and support the assertion that palm-stand are the result of long-standing human actions, rather than purely ecological and physical attributes. The identification of driving social factors allowed to inquire into the underlying LD processes.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thanks Biol. Fernando Reyes Flores, Director of the Tehuacan–Cuicatlan Biosphere Reserve, for all the support granted for ongoing research in the reserve relating B. dulcis palm stands and several other resources and socio-ecological systems. Thanks to Dr. Oswaldo Téllez-Valdés, from UBIPRO FES-Iztacala, UNAM, for providing high-resolution climatic layers for feeding the model, to Luis Valderrama for providing information regarding palm-stand sites, and to Horacio Torres de Ita, from El Torito A.C. for sharing relevant information of ground-truth areas. The first author thanks the CONACyT for the scholarship granted for her Ph.D. studies.
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Species distribution modeling to approach processes of landscape domestication in central-southern Mexico
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Pérez-Valladares, C.X., Moreno-Calles, A.I., Mas, J.F. et al. Species distribution modeling as an approach to studying the processes of landscape domestication in central southern Mexico. Landsc Ecol 37, 461–476 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01365-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01365-w