Australian acacias, or ‘wattles’, are a large clade with over 1000 tree and shrub species. Many have been moved extensively around the world by humans over the past 250 years. Seeds have been exchanged and widely disseminated for purposes ranging from botanic curiosity to ornamental gardening, and from land rehabilitation to industrial forestry. This has created a massive global-scale experiment with opportunities for gaining insights into factors that influence the ways that different introduced species have been assimilated into ecosystems, human cultures, and value systems and how these factors change over time and under different circumstances.
A previous study (
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2011.00783.x), conducted over 10 years ago, investigated how acacias are valued, used, adopted, and perceived around the world. That study showed that differences across countries and regions were explained by biology and environment (which species, what environment was it growing in, how invasive it was, by the social and economic context (people’s subsistence needs, the presence of markets, the structure of land ownership, prevalent ideas concerning the environment, and economic development levels), and by people’s familiarity with the trees (related to why and how the trees were introduced, knowledge and skills transfer, length of time, proximity, and abundance).
The study described eighteen acacia landscapes around the world, and grouped them into four situations: (1) places where poor rural communities host agro-forestry project interventions that encourage acacia planting, like in Mali, Congo, Dominican Republic, and Ethiopia; (2) places where poor people take advantage of acacias as a resource already widespread in their landscapes, like in Madagascar, India, or communal land residents and farm labourers in South Africa; (3) places with a formal forest products industry, involving households and businesses alike, as in Brazil, Vietnam, South Africa, and Chile; and finally (4) rich country communities dealing with the legacies of former or niche use of introduced acacias, and rarely reliant on acacias for domestic uses, like in France, Hawai‘i, Réunion, Israel, and Portugal.
A subsequent study (
https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_7AE0CD1FE3A6.P001/REF) used the stories of different acacia landscapes to illustrate the concept of “regime shifts” in social-ecological systems. According to that study, a regime shift is “a major, sudden, and persistent change in the tightly interrelated patterns, functions and processes that are perceived to characterize and/or maintain particular society-environment phenomena of interest.” A major example of such a regime shift might include the rapid establishment in the 1990s and 2000s of over 1 million hectares of acacia trees in Vietnam, coincident with major policy changes from the Đổi Mới reforms onward. Or, the change in environmental and social policy in the 1990s in South Africa leading to the Working for Water program (which pays people to remove invasive acacias).
The present project seeks to build on these two studies, with the objective of identifying shifts and trends in how Australian acacias are used, perceived, and managed in the landscapes in which they grow wild or in managed stands around the world in the last 10-15 years. In a context where (a) acacias are important economic resources in many places, where (b) concern over invasion of acacias into natural ecosystems or weedy impacts on other economic and non-economic activities and sentiments (e.g. sense of place) have gained much attention, and where (c) global concern over climate change leads to policy pushes for carbon-stocking tree planting like ‘trillion trees’. Tshis project will provide an important overview of trends and upcoming issues related to Australian acacias globally.
