Faculty Research: Sean Downey

Slash-and-burn agriculture in Belize

By studying the relationship between human populations and swidden — or slash-and-burn — agriculture, associate professor of anthropology Sean Downey hopes to develop a better understanding of the dynamic between rural communities, the ecological and environmental impacts of their subsistence farming techniques, and how that applies to contemporary cultures and environmental sustainability.

These ponderings have ultimately led Downey, an ecological anthropologist, to the remote Q’eqchi’ Maya farming villages nestled within the lush, green jungles of southern Belize, where he’s in the midst of a five-year, National Science Foundation-backed research project titled “CAREER: Analyzing the Emergence of a Complex Swidden Management System in the Toledo District, Belize.”

“The main goal is sustainability,” Downey said. “We have growing populations, and we need to know how to feed them without ruining the planet that we’re living on. Swidden is a form of subsistence that has been used for the last 10,000 years and currently feeds between 200 million and 500 million people. Yet we do not have particularly good models explaining how it works and the conditions when it’s most sustainable. We need to know much more about the social and environmental factors related to it.”

Much of the research project’s first two years focused on comprehensive social and environmental data collection. Downey and a team of researchers conducted household surveys, took extensive notes while participating in day-to-day tasks and used game theory to make behavioral and social observations from an interactive agriculture field experiment they developed that simulated agricultural decision making. The game — which represents the forest using a 10x10 square board with removable game pieces — requires participants to choose between their own financial interests and the good of the group, as well as their understanding of the forest’s ability to provide sustainably for the duration of the game. The experiment is aimed at shedding light on the relationship between social traditions and ecological and environmental longevity and sustainability.

“I was really happy when I was doing interviews afterward with folks and how they responded,” Downey said. “I’d ask them if the game seemed familiar, and one person I was interviewing looked at me with a note of surprise and said, ‘This is our village.’ When he was playing the game, he was struck by how familiar it was — both in the way it modeled social norms for labor exchange and labor reciprocity, and the circumstances that caused certain people to overuse the forest but also to come together to preserve it.

Perhaps the most technically challenging and intensive datacollecting technique Downey and his collaborators at the University of Maryland Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site embarked on was the comprehensive aerial photography of more than 17,000 acres of land. They used a pair of FireFLY6 drones outfitted with multispectral cameras to collect thousands of images that depict the agricultural capacity of the landscape.

The images are taken annually, and two data sets have been captured already — one in 2017 and another in 2018 — leaving three sets of data to go. The images are sent to a photogrammetry specialist who uses specialized software to stitch the pictures together.

“One of the basic outputs is something called NDVI — the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index — and it’s essentially a greenness indicator,” Downey said. “The greener things are, the healthier they are. Obviously, when you chop down a field, it’s not as green. So, the idea is we can use those differences and indices to look at ecosystem cycling hopefully over large scales.”

Despite the in-depth nature of the data gathering, the social contexts, political tensions and obligations to perform his research in a respectful and culturally conscious way are not far from Downey’s mind. The communities have been historically oppressed, and they just recently gained legal access to their own lands.

“While the primary goal is to conduct basic research into sustainability, one of the broader impacts of the project is to make the data useful to the community as they grapple with legally managing their community land,” Downey said.

Looking ahead, it’s nearly time for Downey to delve into and analyze the data he’s accumulated, from which there will be reports to write and presentations to give. He’ll also spend the 2018-19 academic year teaching at Ohio State while simultaneously facilitating a service-learning project in Belize, which will bring together students from Ohio State and Belize to focus on research problems that will be determined in case collaboration with the community. He will return to Belize to continue the project in 2019.

“I always like to push methods in anthropology forward as much as I can, and in this case that means using advanced technologies like the drone survey,” Downey said. “It’s going to be really exciting to start digging into the analysis.”