Abstract
This chapter shows how people use different ecosystems, specifically the main island and barrier island ecosystems of the study area with their independent geological histories, that are separated by a coral lagoon sea. This chapter addresses a variety of disciplines such as land use, shifting cycles, land tenure, soil nutrients, subsistence production, vegetation, land cover change, and carrying capacity. As the results, the productivity per shifting cycle of the barrier island was the highest among the different geographical locations analyzed here. This cycle was supported by natural characteristics and social system. The main island was also useful for the villagers for conducting new economic activities such as planting of perennial cash crops rather than for subsistence production. The different uses of the barrier and main islands allowed the villagers to integrate new cash crops without the concerns of food security while receiving the benefits of sustainable production from the barrier island. The GPS tracking of villagers showed they also used a wide area of sea and a variety of marine ecosystems by traveling more than 30 km before returning home. The villagers’ subsistence lifestyle depended on the diversity of the landscape/seascape and the availability of various species.
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Notes
- 1.
A random sample constituted 15 household s in August 2003, and all the household heads and their spouses of these households agreed to participate in the study.
- 2.
Codiaeum variegatum (zazalagaba) and Cordyline terminalis (zipolo) have also been recognized as having magic al uses and were planted in settlement s or near garden s in Roviana and Marovo (Hviding and Bayliss-Smith 2000)
- 3.
A random sample constituted 14 household s in February 2001 and May 2002, and 15 in August 2003 (see footnote 5), and all the household heads and their spouses of these households agreed to participate in the study. In each household, the household head and his/her spouse were asked to report the places where his/her household cultivated garden s. Subsequently, the author accompanied the participants as a part of their horticultural activities and confirmed the garden locations. The land areas of all the gardens owned by the participants were measured using a tape measure and a clinometer. Note that the villagers conducted horticultural activities throughout the year without seasonal variations, because the temperature and precipitation varied little in this region during the year.
- 4.
For each of the participant household s in 2003 (see footnotes 5 and 6), the head and his/her spouse were asked to report their shifting cycle s for the garden s that they currently used (hereafter, “current garden”) and those they had abandon ed during the year before the interview (“abandoned garden”). Limiting these questions to those gardens abandoned within the last year minimized any bias introduced by problems the participants may have had in remembering their past activities. For each garden, the head and spouse of each household were asked if anyone had used the place for horticulture before them (Q1), how long the place had remained unused (or fallow ed) before they began cultivation (Q2), and how long they had used (cultivated) the place before they abandoned it or how long they had used (cultivated) the place until the time of the interview (Q3). They were asked to refer to known events such as the end of World War II , the independence of Solomon Islands, the change of the chief taincy, and the outset of the logging operation if they were unable to report the exact number of years. Their answers were crosschecked using aerial photograph s.
- 5.
However, that type of cultivation was also observed in atoll environments in Melanesia . (Bayliss–Smith 1974).
- 6.
If the head and spouse of each household replied that anyone had used the current garden location for horticulture before them, they were also asked to explain their relationship with that person. The persons using the gardens before the sampled individual s were classified into one of three groups as follows: (1) the participants themselves, or their parents or siblings, (2) someone who lived in the same village as the participants or were genetically related to the participants within two generations, and (3) individuals from another village, having no kinship with the participants for more than at least two generations. Moreover, open-ended interviews were conducted for each participant to reveal the change in land use at each location in the last three to four decades.
- 7.
In 2003, soil nutrient s were measured using a Midori-kun field test-kit (Tokyo University of Agriculture, Tokyo, Japan), which uses a semiquantitative filtration paper to measure the components of soils at a depth of 10 cm. The soil analyses were performed for soils within 3 days of collection.
- 8.
In August to September 2003
- 9.
If food s had been consumed in the garden s or given to other household s before the author visited, the participants were asked to report the amount, by referring to the various sizes of samples that had already been measured; these cases accounted for only seven out of 147 recorded household-harvest events.
- 10.
- 11.
The head of each household and his/her spouse were asked to report the local names of the plant species planted in each garden, and the author confirmed the existence of the reported plants in the gardens. All plants in the gardens were identified by Roviana vernacular names, and specimens of plants were later identified at the Poitete Forestry School (Mr. Myknee Qusa) and Forestry Station, Munda (Mr. Basile Gua), Ministry of Forest, Environment, and Conservation of Solomon Islands.
- 12.
- 13.
The proportion of household s with tribal affiliations to Saikile accounted for 100 %, 98 %, 84 %, and 79 % in the people in the villages of Olive , Nusa Hope, Baraulu, and Ha’apai , respectively (Aswani 2002).
- 14.
This research was conducted during a one-week period in July 2007, and follow-up surveys were completed in the following weeks. See Furusawa (2011) for information on the technical limitations of adopting this method for the convenience of future fieldworkers.
- 15.
The GPS unit was packed in a small (15 cm × 16 cm) water-proof PET electronic protection bag (Seal Line; Cascade Designs, Inc., Seattle, WA, USA). Each participant wore this bag on his/her waist. The Foretrex 101 (Garmin, Ltd., Olathe, KS, USA) is a bat tery-driven, water-resistant, and wristwatch-size GPS unit that weighs 78 g. An internal memory card provides the unit with the capacity to store 10,000 points, and two alkaline AAA batteries can run the system for approximately 15 hours. The units were set to record the GPS coordinates of their locations at five-second intervals with the Wide Area Augmentation System enabled. Rodriguez et al. (2005), in their study of residents’ daily lives in a town in North Carolina, USA, confirmed that a wristwatch-size GPS unit (Foretrex 201, Garmin Ltd.) had a high level of accuracy; the average distance from the recorded points to the geodetic point was 3.02 m, while 81.1 % and 99.9 % of points were located within 5-m and 20-m buffers, respectively.
- 16.
The GPS record provided the location and the rate of movement during a trip. Because the author had identified the locations and activities that the villagers used in fishing during previous fieldwork, the precise locations and activities based on the GPS record in tandem with the participants’ detailed reports were identified.
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Furusawa, T. (2016). Subsistence on the Main Island, Barrier Islands, and at Sea. In: Living with Biodiversity in an Island Ecosystem. Ethnobiology. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-904-2_4
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