An analysis of the influence of the human presence on the distribution of provisioning ecosystem services: A Guyana case study

Abstract Indigenous peoples have long shaped the distributions of plants from which they derive ecosystems services (ES) critical to their subsistence lifestyles. Yet, much of our knowledge on how anthropogenic activities influence these ES by extension has been derived from ethnographic studies. In this paper we examined whether signals of the human presence could be detected from the distributions of two types of provisioning ecosystem services (PES) derived from plants – subsistence uses and commercial logging – in the Rupununi, Southern Guyana. The Rupununi landscape is dominated by indigenous peoples who have strong historical reliance on their forests for subsistence purposes; at the same time, many of the forest species hold considerable commercial timber values. Indices that quantified the subsistence and commercial logging PES were regressed against the five variables intended to estimate the human presence within the landscape – distance-to-village, distance-to-road, distance-to-water, elevation, and slope – at the landscape- and village-level. The analysis showed that the impact of the variables on both types of PES were stronger at the former level than at the latter. At the landscape-level, three variables (distance-to-village, distance-to-road, and elevation) significantly influenced the distributions of subsistence services while four variables (distance-to-village, distance-to-road, distance-to-water, and elevation) significantly influenced the distributions of logging services. On the other hand, at the village-level the effects of each variable on the two PES varied from village to village. In general, although the presence of subsistence services appeared to be more favorable than logging services, the distributions of both types of PES were still comparable across the landscape. The analysis supports earlier observations from ethnographic studies that suggested the human presence does influence the distributions of ES associated with plants and has implications for how logging is practiced in the tropics.