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ABSTRACT. This article examines food security in Funafuti, Tuvalu in the context of recent social-ecological changes. We consider both social and ecological processes in order to provide a holistic account of food security. An analysis of data collected through a fixed-question survey and freelists with 50 households and semistructured interviews with 25 key informants reveal that access to food of sufficient nutritional and cultural value is the primary driver affecting food security, more so than general food availability. Ten percent of the households surveyed experienced a shortage of food in the previous month, and 52% ate less desirable imported foods, which tended to be nutrient poor because they could not access preferred local foods. Factors and processes affecting access to local foods include: availability of and access to land; declining involvement in local food production; the convenience of imported foods; unreliable interisland shipping; and climate and environmental changes that have negatively affected food security and are expected to continue to do so.

Arthropods are the most diverse taxonomic group of terrestrial eukaryotes and are sensitive to physical alterations in their environment such as those caused by forestry. With their enormous diversity and physical omnipresence, arthropods could be powerful indicators of the effects of disturbance following forestry. When arthropods have been used to measure the effects of disturbance, the total diversity of some groups is often found to increase following forestry. However, these findings are frequently derived using a coarse taxonomic grain (family or order) to accommodate for various taxonomic impediments (including cryptic diversity and poorly resourced taxonomists). Our intent with this work was to determine the diversity of arthropods in and around Algonquin Park, and how this diversity was influenced by disturbance (in this case, forestry within the past 25 years). We used DNA barcode-derived diversity estimates (Barcode Index Number (BIN) richness) to avoid taxonomic impediments and as a source of genetic information with which we could conduct phylogenetic estimates of diversity (PD). Diversity patterns elucidated with PD are often, but not always congruent with taxonomic estimates–and departures from these expectations can help clarify disturbance effects that are hidden from richness studies alone. We found that BIN richness and PD were greater in disturbed (forested) areas, however when we controlled for the expected relationship between PD and BIN richness, we found that cut sites contained less PD than expected and that this diversity was more phylogenetically clustered than would be predicted by taxonomic richness. While disturbance may cause an evident increase in diversity, this diversity may not reflect the full evolutionary history of the assemblage within that area and thus a subtle effect of disturbance can be found decades following forestry.