Agricultural expansion and the ecological marginalization of forest-dependent people

Abstract

Significance Millions of people globally rely on forest-based resources for their livelihoods, particularly in the tropics and subtropics. Deforestation is often hypothesized to diminish forest-dependent communities’ resource base and to push them toward more-marginal environments, but such ecological marginalization has rarely been quantified. We developed an approach to identify homesteads of forest-dependent people and to track their resource base over 30 y across the entire South American Gran Chaco (1.1 million km 2 ). This highlighted that forest-dependent people are widespread across the Chaco forests, that their numbers have declined drastically since the 1980s, and that expanding commodity agriculture diminishes their resource base. Sustainability assessments must urgently consider forest-dependent people better, and our study provides a way forward to do so.