In the Andapa region of northeast Madagascar, smallholders cultivating swidden hill rice (tavy) for subsistence are pressing against neighboring nature reserves. A dominant policy approach to reducing this pressure requires that smallholders abandon tavy and purchase rice from proceeds obtained from their environmentally sustainable commercial crops, vanilla and coffee. Economic liberalization policies have succeeded in stimulating the expansion of these commercial crops, but have failed to reduce tavy production. We ask why this dual (subsistence and commercial) production system persists. We test two explanatory views: that either market imperfections deny farmers full entry into the market, or that internal production goals or socio-cultural norms create barriers to full market participation. Results support the latter view, although not for reasons that have been associated with this view in past studies. We propose a new factor that may serve as a barrier to full-market immersion among Andapa tavy farmers, the social relations of property.

To help mitigate large wetland losses in California, The Nature Conservancy launched a dynamic conservation incentive program to create temporary wetland habitats in harvested and fallow rice fields for shorebirds migrating along the Pacific Flyway. Farmers were invited to participate in a reverse auction bidding process and winning bids were selected based on their cost and potential to provide high quality shorebird habitat. This was done in 2014 and 2015, for separate enrollment periods that overlapped with spring and fall migration, both before and after the traditional post-harvest flooding period. To assess the success of the program, we monitored shorebird use of fields that were enrolled (treatments), and others that were subject to typical rice farm management (controls). To put these observations in context, we used satellites to simultaneously monitor the extent of shallow-water habitat across the ~215,000 ha of ricelands in the area. Results showed that providing habitat during migration, when it is typically unavailable in rice fields, yielded the largest average shorebird densities ever reported for agriculture in the region. Treatment fields had significantly greater shorebird density, richness and diversity than control fields in both spring and fall (especially September-early October, and late March-early April), but in fall the difference was greater. Shorebird responses to habitat provisioning, and regional habitat conditions, were variable from year to year, and highly dynamic within a given season. Overall, shorebirds densities were found to be negatively related to the total amount of flooded habitat in the rice landscape. Factors that affected habitat availability included allocation schedules of water deliveries from reservoirs, and rainfall patterns, both of which were influenced by drought. Collectively, these results suggest that appropriately managed agricultural lands have great potential to provide high value habitat for shorebirds during times of habitat deficit, including migration, and that fall may be a particularly impactful time to create additional habitat. Migratory species face great challenges due to the climate change, conversion of historical stopover sites, and other factors, but dynamic conservation programs offer promise that, at least in certain instances, their needs can still be met.

This study investigates smallholder responses to land pressure in the Andapa region of Madagascar. Recent enforcement of conservation laws has abruptly closed the agricultural frontier, and development experts warn of land degradation if exogenous support is not forthcoming. To evaluate responses, the study identifies adaptive and maladaptive management strategies by production sector instead of by production system, allowing for a more precise linkage between strategies and associated land change. Results reveal a remarkably positive response to land pressure, with significant expansion of both market tree crops and irrigated rice fields. Yet, the study also finds excessive cropping frequency in the hill-rice sector, demonstrating independently motivated and environmentally inconsistent strategies within production systems. This evidence calls for a new formulation of the induced intensification thesis's bipolar model predicting either adaptive or maladaptive change. It also suggests that exogenous policies, such as those designed to promote environmentally preferred production sectors in order to substitute for less desirable sectors, may not have their desired effect in Andapa. Aggregating data to identify broad-level trajectories of change reveals incommensurate results across levels of analysis, highlighting a scale dynamic anticipated by spatial geographers but inadequately addressed in human-environment literatures.

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Promoting wildlife habitat on working agricultural land is a growing conservation priority, and agri-environment schemes are using payments for environmental services (PES) to reach these privately owned lands. PES can be ecologically effective, but also expensive, putting pressure on these schemes to be cost-effective, maximizing the conservation value of their limited resources. This study assesses the cost-effectiveness of four PES schemes in California that paid rice growers to provide temporary flood habitat on their working lands in support of shorebirds. It examines whether the schemes (1) paid for flood habitat only when needed (targeting); (2) paid for habitat that was actually delivered and would not otherwise be provided (additionality); (3) sacrificed as little habitat as possible when the habitat competed with production (ag/wildlife balance); and (4) fostered a commitment among growers to maintain the habitat after payments ended (permanence). Results show that the schemes fell short in each of the four goals, and they expose several factors that undermined their cost-effectiveness. First, variable weather patterns altered the date in which the shorebird-habitat gap emerged year-to-year, creating a dynamic and unpredictable target for the schemes to address. Second, growers' views on the compatibility of the flood habitat with their rice production varied widely and changed rapidly as the agricultural calendar progressed, making it a challenge to mitigate potential ag/wildlife conflicts. Third, water for flood habitat is expensive, and growers proved unwilling to shoulder that expense once payments ended. These results highlight the need for schemes to adopt design elements that can add flexibility, such as cancelation clauses, so that they can adjust to dynamic targets and adapt to changing ag/wildlife relationships. Results also suggest that PES schemes operating on working lands may require long-term external support. That finding amplifies the imperative that schemes use their conservation resources cost-effectively.