Dr. Sean Downey Awarded NSF Career Grant to Study Sustainability of Traditional Farming Practice in Belize

Sean Downey, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, has been awarded a $500,000 grant through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). Through the grant, Downey, a team of graduate students and international collaborators will conduct a comprehensive study of a farming practice common in Mayan villages in Belize.

For more than a decade, Downey has been working with Q’eqchi’ Maya villagersin southern Belize where the practice of swidden agriculture – also known as "slash-and-burn" – is commonplace. Through this technique, farmers clear a patch of forest by cutting with axes and machetes, and burn the vegetation to release nutrients into the soil. The land is then used to grow corn and root crops, and after a several-year period of cultivation, the land is then left to fallow – or regrow – over a number of years to restore fertility.

“Swidden agriculture has been widely maligned in many circles for being an agent of deforestation but research has clearly shown, for example, that it can actually increase biodiversity,” said Downey, PhD. “My project tackles the question of how this occurs. How do local communities organize their labor and traditional ecological knowledge to ensure the sustainability of their common resources?  And how do these practices relate to ecosystem dynamics? I have several hypotheses for explaining this, and my project will collect ethnographic and environmental data in Belize to test them by analyzing how this coupled human-nature system changes over time.”  

During this five-year project, Downey will utilize drones to create high-resolution multi-spectral maps of regrowing swidden fields surrounding two Q’eqchi’ villages annually for a period of five years in order to monitor the changing landscape. His team will also use ethnographic methods including household surveys and interviews, as well and methods from experimental behavioral economics to understand how social dynamics relate to the observed changes in landscape-scale patterns. 

“Ultimately this research will provide evidence that the farming practices in these villages can contribute to the long-term sustainability of mixed-use tropical forests. I hope this will encourage policy adjustments to support traditional forms of agriculture that may increase food security and promote social justice for indigenous groups in Belize and around the world,” said Downey.

The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who successfully integrate teaching and research to support the mission of their departments and universities. Downey will work with undergraduate students from Belize and master’s and PhD students from the University of Maryland to complete the fieldwork. He plans to incorporate the project into his teaching by developing a new course on applying computational and non-linear methods for analyzing complex systems in the social sciences.

Published on Tue, 03/29/2016 - 10:09