06/12/2026
A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows how culture and local norms help small farming communities manage forests sustainably. The study reflects more than a decade of work by Associate Professor of Anthropology Sean Downey, with support from an NSF CAREER award, and finds that social norms in small-scale societies can help communities manage forests sustainably. In other words, the forest is not simply being cleared; it is being managed through local knowledge, labor sharing, and ecological feedback.
The work brings together ethnographic fieldwork, mathematical modeling, remote sensing, and social theory. That mix made it possible to connect what farmers do on the ground with the large-scale patterns visible from above, and to test a social-ecological explanation against real landscapes.
The project brought together an interdisciplinary team with expertise in anthropology, remote sensing, mathematics, physics, and ecology, as well as undergraduate contributors, reflecting the department’s commitment to excellence in student mentoring and interdisciplinary research. Together, the team helped connect social life in farming communities with large-scale patterns in forest landscapes.
The study matters not only for communities using swidden today and policy designed to combat climate change, but also for understanding early societies known only through the archaeological record. By showing how local rules and ecological feedback can organize land use without centralized control, it offers a framework for thinking about the persistence of swidden across the Holocene.
The paper, “Adaptive self-organization of global swidden forests,” was led by Sean S. Downey, Associate Professor of Anthropology. He is Core Faculty in the OSU Sustainability Institute and affiliated with the OSU Translational Data Analytics Institute.
Check out the paper here:
https://lnkd.in/gaQZbMhF
