Cattle Ranching Expansion in the Maranhão Amazon

184 pages of interview data investigate the principal causes of deforestation in South America. The book analyzes the socioeconomic and biophysical factors influencing cattle ranching growth in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. An interdisciplinary research team from SCIOPS conducted in-depth interviews with land managers for this 2003 study.

Use Cases

• Analyze interview transcripts to identify key 'social and biophysical factors' cited by landholders in their decision to invest in cattle.
• Model the relationship between 'pasture management technologies' selected by producers and subsequent deforestation rates.
• Extract policy recommendations from the book's conclusion for mitigating cattle-driven deforestation in the Amazon region.
• Study the 'decision making process' described across six chapters to build agent-based models of land-use change.

Strengths

• Data is based on in-depth interviews providing qualitative depth on decision-making processes.
• The 184-page regional case study offers a detailed, interdisciplinary analysis.

Limitations

• The dataset is a single book from 2003, making the findings potentially temporally stale for current analysis.
• The qualitative interview format yields non-tabular data, limiting quantitative modeling without significant feature extraction.
• Geographic scope is limited to the state of Maranhão, Brazil, which may not be generalizable to the entire Amazon.

Provenance

Source

SCIOPS, accessed via NASA Earthdata.

Collection Method

In-depth interviews performed with land managers by an interdisciplinary research team.

Time Range

2003

Freshness

null

Geography

State of Maranhão, Brazil, in the Amazon basin.