Productive Diversification and Sustainable Use of Complex Social-Ecological Systems: A Comparative Study of Indigenous and Settler Communities in the Bolivian Amazon

Agricultural and forest productive diversification depends on multiple socioeconomic drivers—like knowledge, migration, productive capacity, and market—that shape productive strategies and influence their ecological impacts. Our comparison of indigenous and settlers allows a better understanding of how societies develop different diversification strategies in similar ecological contexts and how the related socioeconomic aspects of diversification are associated with land cover change. Our results suggest that although indigenous people cause less deforestation and diversify more, diversification is not a direct driver of deforestation reduction. A multidimensional approach linking sociocognitive, economic, and ecological patterns of diversification helps explain this contradiction.

Pulse-shaping assisted multidimensional coherent electronic spectroscopy

Understanding nuclear and electronic dynamics of molecular systems has advanced considerably by probing their nonlinear responses with a suitable sequence of pulses. Moreover, the ability to control crucial parameters of the excitation pulses, such as duration, sequence, frequency, polarization, slowly varying envelope, or carrier phase, has led to a variety of advanced time-resolved spectroscopic methodologies. Recently, two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy with ultrashort pulses has become a more and more popular tool since it allows to obtain information on energy and coherence transfer phenomena, line broadening mechanisms, or the presence of quantum coherences in molecular complexes. Here, we present a high fidelity two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy setup designed for molecular systems in solution. It incorporates the versatility of pulse-shaping methods to achieve full control on the amplitude and phase of the individual exciting and probing pulses. Selective and precise amplitude- and phase-modulation is shown and applied to investigate electronic dynamics in several reference molecular systems.