The ecological side of an ethnobotanical coin: legacies in historically managed trees.

UNLABELLED: • PREMISE OF THE STUDY: A growing body of literature now documents how ancient human management of the landscape echoes through to extant environments in eastern North America. Plant domestication is a major theme in the study of human-nature interactions. Long-term ecological impacts of human selection may last for centuries after management ends, yet little work has focused on legacies in the evolution of historically used trees. Ecological data will be valuable in teasing apart myriad variables that confound questions of land-use legacies. We discuss the potential for legacies of ancient human selection and present a preliminary case study for the approach of integrating ecological and historical data for Diospyros virginiana, the American persimmon.• METHODS: Herbarium samples of D. virginiana (28 male and 40 female) from across the species range provided specimen localities for edaphic analysis. Soil and environmental data were analyzed using nonparametric ordination, Wilcoxon summed rank test, and permutational MANOVA.• KEY RESULTS: Edaphic data demonstrated substantial variation among sites, but revealed no significant differences between sexes. Permutational MANOVA showed no difference in environmental preferences for the tested variables between male and female trees (R(2) < 0.01, P = 0.8).• CONCLUSIONS: Extending our understanding of landscape history to the long-term impacts of artificial selection at the species or population level would be valuable in both theoretical and applied botanical research. Multidisciplinary approaches integrating ecological data will be essential for investigation of the evolutionary implications of historical human selection in economic species and the potential for adaptive flexibility in reproductive systems of long-lived perennials.

Modern tree species composition reflects ancient Maya "forest gardens" in northwest Belize.

Ecology and ethnobotany were integrated to assess the impact of ancient Maya tree-dominated home gardens (i.e., "forest gardens"), which contained a diversity of tree species used for daily household needs, on the modern tree species composition of a Mesoamerican forest. Researchers have argued that the ubiquity of these ancient gardens throughout Mesoamerica led to the dominance of species useful to Maya in the contemporary forest, but this pattern may be localized depending on ancient land use. The tested hypothesis was that species composition would be significantly different between areas of dense ancient residential structures (high density) and areas of little or no ancient settlement (low density). Sixty-three 400-m2 plots (31 high density and 32 low density) were censused around the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve in northwestern Belize. Species composition was significantly different, with higher abundances of commonly utilized "forest garden" species still persisting in high-density forest areas despite centuries of abandonment. Subsequent edaphic analyses only explained 5% of the species composition differences. This research provides data on the long-term impacts of Maya forests gardens for use in development of future conservation models. For Mesoamerican conservation programs to work, we must understand the complex ecological and social interactions within an ecosystem that developed in intimate association with humans.