Sanna Mäki

Road construction in the Peruvian amazon : process, causes and consequences

In the north-western Peruvian Amazon, a new road has recently been constructed to link the city of Iquitos with the town of Nauta. The road crosses lands that are remarkably heterogeneous in terms of ecological conditions, comprising distinctive soil types from extremely poor to relatively fertile. Although this reality contributes to the land use potential and human carrying capacity of each place, deforestation of road margins appears equally intensive on all types of land. In the mid-1990s, two dead-end roads starting from both urban centres were characterized by distinctive zones of resource exploitation, with a road-free section of primary forest in between. A few years later, the separate road ends were linked by a dirt road that served only occasional traffic, but introduced significant new settlement. Various developmental trends evidence incoherent resource management and momentary public support in the region. By promoting diverse economic activities that reflect environmental conditions in the initial land use planning and land allocation, most sections along this road could be considered economically valuable for purposes such as sustainable forestry, tourism, agroforestry and, in suitable sites, intensive agriculture. To promote the more sustainable uses, thorough environmental legislation, administrative guidelines and follow-up based on an implicit mechanism of learning from previous experiences should be implemented. At the local level, there are some important initiatives to support such development, including ecological and economic zoning. However, these measures might be too late to prevent the destructive practices so common in many parts of Amazonia.

Visualization and Communication in Map-Making: A Case Study of Mapping a Complex Rainforest Environment in Peruvian Amazonia

Producing good-quality landscape maps of remote areas such as tropical rainforests is difficult because such areas are environmentally complex and not easily accessible. Existing thematic maps commonly appear far more finished than is warranted by the mapping and research effort that lies behind them, and they do not provide the map user the opportunity to properly evaluate the product. Here we examine the production of an experimental map based on multidisciplinary research on landscape variation and the effect such variation has on land use potential within Peruvian lowland Amazonia. The map aims at representing the environmental heterogeneity of the region and the scientific uncertainty of that knowledge. Remote sensing, image processing and interpretation, GIS, and field inventory methods were applied in the production of the map. The final map shows a combination of raw and interpreted data as thematic components, illustrating the natural environment and details of human activity. Each map component ...

Accessibility of lowland rain forests of Western Amazonia via rivers - An analysis using Landsat TM mosaic and GIS

In the present paper a mosaic of 130 Landsat TM satellite images is used to identify navigable rives in the Western Amazon region and to analyse the accessibility pattern of the area via the river network. The environmental heterogeneity of the Western Amazonia is enormous, and thus the potential for human use varies significantly. In sustainable land use planning accessibility of potential resources is of paramount importance. Most studies and zoning proposals neglect the issue of accessibility or ignore the river network. Our study concentrated on the accessibility in the Western Amazonian region shared by several countries. A Landsat TM mosaic was created over this area and waters were separated by rationing of TM bands 5 and TM, classification and manual corrections. With the 100-meter resolution used, navigable rivers could still be delineated. Grid-based model on the on the accessibility of peripheral areas around regional, provincial and local centres was created and the accessibility pattern of the entire region and within each country was analysed. Nearly entire Peruvian Amazon as well as the vicinities of the main course of the Amazon River were found the most accessible regions, whereas large parts of Colombian and Brazilian Amazon were poorly accessible.