Changes in the Socio-Ecological System of a Protected Area in the Yucatan Peninsula: A Case Study on Land-Use, Vegetation Cover, and Household Management Strategies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. The characterization of SES can be standardized with reference to other articles to further enhance the comparability.
2. Is it possible to combine the theory of forest transition to elaborate on the forest changes in the protected area, and then to enhance the academic value of this article?
3. The consistency and difference of land use changes inside and outside the protected area can be discussed in-depth, and the mechanism diagram can be drawn for analysis, so as to enhance the scientific significance of this article.
4. It is recommended to compare and analyze with other research, and to explore feasible strategies for ecological protection and households' livelihood balance.

Author Response

REVIEWER 1

Comment 1: The characterization of SES can be standardized with reference to other articles to further enhance the comparability.

How addressed: Thank you for the comment. Most of the papers that use a social-ecological approach for understanding protected areas are conceptual papers. This limits us in standardizing the characterization for comparison purposes. However, we have included in the Introduction several sentences that help to further develop the idea of protected areas as social-ecological systems. For example, lines 80-91 of the Introduction:

In addition to reducing deforestation and maintaining the ecological integrity of ecosystems, there has been a paradigm shift in how PAs should operate: from the island approach or "fencing nature" where the use of resources is spatially restricted, to the social-ecological approach or creating "networks of nature" that transcend the PAs boundaries [14]. Under the latter vision, PAs should acknowledge the complexity of social-ecological interactions and conserve resources for the benefit of people and nature, and integrate local interests and participation into conservation projects [15].

 

Comment 2: Is it possible to combine the theory of forest transition to elaborate on the forest changes in the protected area, and then to enhance the academic value of this article?

How addressed: Very interesting comment, thank you. We thought a lot about how to incorporate this theory (and its implications) into the current approach, but we consider that the characteristics of the site do not provide enough information to explore this. We explain why from three different perspective:

From the proximate drivers of change perspective, the main cause of “deforestation” or “reforestation” is the expansion or abandonment of milpa agriculture. Indeed, the abandonment of milpa inside the reserve increased in young secondary forest, but the scale and rate at which this practice is conducted does not constitute a major threat for the continuity of the forest cover. Additionally, the rotational nature of the practice does not produce large and sustained deforestation, but rather a mosaic of covers, being the forest in different successional stages the dominant one.

From the distant drivers of change perspective, the abandonment of milpa inside the reserve was not due to an increase in the economy or a reduction in the number of people (as the forest transition theory would assume), but rather from an institutional prohibition. In addition, as shown in the results, the increase in income benefited some households but most of them continue a mixed strategy, meaning they continue to do milpas (albeit much smaller). On the other hand, migration in this region is transitory, mostly for temporary jobs in the Riviera Maya, meaning there is the same potential pressure on resources (or the forest).

But more importantly, on the landscape scale, although there has been land cover change, the dominant cover has always been forest. In other words, although there have been particular cases where forest transitions from milpa to forest (as our results show), as a whole, the landscape has not shifted from less forest to more forest.

 

Comment 3: The consistency and difference of land use changes inside and outside the protected area can be discussed in-depth, and the mechanism diagram can be drawn for analysis, so as to enhance the scientific significance of this article.

How addressed: Thank you for the comments, which we interpret it as two – one to discuss in depth the consistency and difference of land use changes inside and outside the protected area, and the second as a suggestion to draw the mechanism diagram for analysis. For the first one, we have reviewed the discussion and added in the discussion (lines 479-490). These are the main consistencies and differences: Land use changes were consistent within and outside the reserve: milpa cover decreased (virtually disappearing inside the reserve) while forest cover increased. In addition, inside and outside the reserve, the number of households that only followed a traditional strategy decreased, while those that implemented a mixed strategy (combining traditional and service oriented) increased. However, households inside the reserve became more specialized (reducing the number of activities to one or two dominant ones), while outside they diversified, incorporating at least one or two new activities to their management strategy.

 

Comment 4: It is recommended to compare and analyze with other research, and to explore feasible strategies for ecological protection and households' livelihood balance.

How addressed: We have included several comparisons and references in our discussion to give it more context. In our discussion we argue, and cite several papers in support, that the diversification of rural livelihood strategies has been identified as an important aspect to increase livelihood security, and reduce vulnerability (Elmqvist & Olsson 2006; Ellis 2000; Thulstrup 2015; Martin & Lorenzen 2016).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review Protected Areas are effective for conservation but promote the simplification of the social-ecological system: a case study on land-use, vegetation cover, and natural resources management strategies. This study addresses questions about the impact of protected areas on social-ecological systems that are likely valuable from both an applied policy/conservation perspective and from an academic perspective.

 

The manuscript is generally well-written, and the Introduction and Discussion sections do a good job of tying this study into the broader suite of relevant literature. However, the manuscript would be strengthened by providing more explanation of the management strategies evaluated, focused on what is considered “beneficial” from the perspective of biodiversity, human well-being, economic stability, social stability, etc., within the Introduction section. This would help readers not familiar with the social-ecological system being considered to evaluate and understand the study aims and results. Similarly, the manuscript should clarify within the Abstract – Introduction - Methods that while technically following a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design, this is a descriptive case-study based evaluation and does not provide a formal statistical evaluation of causation as a reader might expect from a BACI study. Lack of replication (one protected area, one community within the PA, one community outside the PA) obviously precludes tests for significance. The manuscript certainly still has value as a case study, this request is simply to help appropriately set reader expectations. Finally, the organization and presentation of the Results section could be condensed to better facilitate the direct before-after-control-impact comparisons that are at the heart of the study. 

 

Specific Comments:

• Ln 73-87: Good framing on grade-offs between ecological and social components within an SES
• Ln108: use an active voice versus “the present study analyses…”
• Ln108-113: Clarify whether the manuscript is testing predictions or just examining questions.
• Ln125: What is RAMSAR?
• Ln136 – 137: Establishment of the PA was noted as a community-based initiative. Explain further role of the Yucatec Maya communities in the establishment of the PA. Was the PA supported by local communities?
• Ln 149: Surface area of “covers” – does this mean change in land cover extent?
• Ln182 – change “costumes” to customs”
• Ln 173-191: The remote sensing methods for presumably a single analysis don’t need to be described twice in sections 2.3 and 2.4. Are the PL and CH delineations necessary to spatially represent the “communities” from an SES perspective? Greater explanation will be helpful for readers not familiar with these SES’s or may be coming from a different frame of reference where “communities” have more specific and standardized geographic boundaries.
• Results Section: The figures, tables, results text could be condensed to facilitate direction comparison for the three framings of overall PA change, PL community change, and CH community change. Currently, the results section doesn’t provide these direct comparisons
• Ln 362 – 380: Shifting to discussion of land sparing vs. land sharing approaches. This language has not been previously introduced within the manuscript for OMYK protected area. Need to provide a stronger intro of how the study area fits into the land sparing / land sharing paradigms.
• Ln 388: Again, for readers unfamiliar with this SES, need to explain that charcoal production is a “less traditional activity”
• Ln 385: What is CO-NANP?
• LN 394: “Contradicting our original prediction…”. Actually, the Introduction as currently written does not make clear predictions, it simply indicates that this is built on other modeled predictions. The objectives/questions/predictions within the Introduction need to be clarified.
• Ln 437-438: Say more about why the “win-win” discourse in conservation needs to be challenged. Don’t disagree – but this statement implies as a given without providing explanation.
• Ln 443-449: Good discussion on the potential downsides to increasingly specialized focus on a single productive activity – tourism. But, it also raises the question of whether or not households are able to re-diversify their activities if tourism suddenly becomes limited. Is this feasible or infeasible for households?
• SI Table – what is “interachange”? 

Author Response

REVIEWER 2

 

Comment 1: Thank you for the opportunity to review Protected Areas are effective for conservation but promote the simplification of the social-ecological system: a case study on land-use, vegetation cover, and natural resources management strategies. This study addresses questions about the impact of protected areas on social-ecological systems that are likely valuable from both an applied policy/conservation perspective and from an academic perspective.

How addressed: Thank you for the comment, we appreciated it.

 

Comment 2: The manuscript is generally well-written, and the Introduction and Discussion sections do a good job of tying this study into the broader suite of relevant literature. However, the manuscript would be strengthened by providing more explanation of the management strategies evaluated, focused on what is considered “beneficial” from the perspective of biodiversity, human well-being, economic stability, social stability, etc., within the Introduction section. This would help readers not familiar with the social-ecological system being considered to evaluate and understand the study aims and results.

How addressed: Thank you for the comment. We have included a more detailed explanation about the characteristics of Yucatec Maya natural resources management strategy. We believe that we now describe in more detail the logic and benefits of managing diversity. We now say (lines 111-141):

For this we conducted a study in a PA in the Yucatan Peninsula that has two decades of being officially decreed as protected. People living in the area are indigenous Yucatec Maya, and most preserve many of their ancient cultural traditions, such as language, religious ceremonies and traditional natural resources management. As it has been widely documented [25,26], Yucatec Mayas have historically managed biodiversity through a diversified strategy of natural resource use. Within this strategy, producers take advantage of the simultaneous development of various productive activities both for self-sufficiency and the market while ensuring food security and subsistence. Diversification reduces the risks associated with external socioeconomic shocks (e.g., changes in prices or lower demand) or ecological events (e.g., hurricanes or droughts) [26,27]. Yucatec Maya natural resource management involves a lower output per unit of land compared with specialized resource management. However, the Yucatec Maya natural resources management strategy has great value because the permanent, dynamic system is based on the benefits of diversity [25,26]. Therefore, instead of maximizing areas of monoculture or specializing in one economic activity, the strategy maintains diversity through the utilization of many land-use units available for different economic activities.

The natural resources management in the PA we studied involves the management of different land-use units (milpa plot, homegardens, secondary forest, old-growth forest, and water-swamp vegetation), and within those units a number of economic activities, either subsistence and/or market-oriented, are implemented with the objective of maximizing the number of available options. Some economic activities are traditional (e.g., milpa agriculture, beekeeping, homegardening, gathering and hunting), while others have been recently incorporated to their management strategy (e.g., ecotourism, handcraft production and charcoal production). Not all households manage all the different land-use units or implement all the economic activities. That depends on the availability of household labor, their income level, how bilingual are the members of the household, among other variables. This management strategy is based on local ecological knowledge and it is constantly adapting to social, economic and ecological changes.

 

Comment 3: Similarly, the manuscript should clarify within the Abstract – Introduction - Methods that while technically following a before-after-control-impact (BACI) design, this is a descriptive case-study based evaluation and does not provide a formal statistical evaluation of causation as a reader might expect from a BACI study. Lack of replication (one protected area, one community within the PA, one community outside the PA) obviously precludes tests for significance. The manuscript certainly still has value as a case study, this request is simply to help appropriately set reader expectations.

How addressed: Thanks for the comment. We agree that the lack of replication weakens the argument of a BACI's approach, so we have decided to simply state that our research is a semi-experimental approach and a descriptive case study based evaluation. We have mentioned it in the Abstract (lines 27-28, in the Introduction (line 153) and in the Materials and Methods sections (lines 217-218).

 

Comment 4: Finally, the organization and presentation of the Results section could be condensed to better facilitate the direct before-after-control-impact comparisons that are at the heart of the study.

How addressed: Thank you for the comment and the suggestion. As explained in comment 13, we have represented the results in the table using a set of graphs (lines 419-424) that we believe better portray the before and after tenencies. For the land cover change, we believe the maps are a good and informative complement for the tables that compare the change in areas.

 

Specific Comments:

Comment 5: Ln 73-87: Good framing on grade-offs between ecological and social components within an SES

How addressed: Thank you for the comment

 

Comment 6: Ln108: use an active voice versus “the present study analyses…”

How addressed: Thank you for the comment. We now use an active voice and say:

…in the present study we analyze the effects that restrictions on land-use associated with the establishment of the PA had on the local SES in terms of changes in (1) vegetation and land cover, and (2) household management strategies.

 

Comment 7: Ln108-113: Clarify whether the manuscript is testing predictions or just examining questions.

How addressed: In our previous article (García-Frapolli et al. 2007), the one that laid the groundwork for this research, we used a cellular automata and Markovian chains change model to predict changes in vegetation in the PA. You are right that in this research we are not doing any predictions. Therefore, in order not to generate confusion, we deleted the first part of the sentence (Following these predictions). We now say (lines 153-158):

In the present study, through a descriptive case study, we analyze the effects that re-strictions on land-use associated with the establishment of the PA had on the local SES in terms of changes in (1) vegetation and land cover, and (2) household management strategies. To do so, we evaluated these changes over time, before (2003) and after (2015) the PA establishment, and over space, exploring the differences between communities located inside and outside of the PA.

 

Comment 8: Ln125: What is RAMSAR?

How addressed: Thank for noticing that we did not describe what a RAMSAR site was. We now say (lines 169-171):

Otoch Ma'ax Yetel Kooh (OMYK) is a "Flora and Fauna Protection Area" (IUCN Category VI) and is also included in a list of wetland sites of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.

 

Comment 9: Ln136 – 137: Establishment of the PA was noted as a community-based initiative. Explain further role of the Yucatec Maya communities in the establishment of the PA. Was the PA supported by local communities?

How addressed: We have added a sentence explaining why the community was in favor of the PA. We now say (lines 205-208):

Local conservation efforts started in the 1980s as a community-based initiative with the support of researchers and a local NGO, leading to the decree of the PA in 2002 [37]. For the community, the PA decree was instrumental for the promotion of tourism activities and thus increased the flow of tourists to the community.

 

Comment 10: Ln 149: Surface area of “covers” – does this mean change in land cover extent?

How addressed:  Yes, we mean land cover extent. We have changed it as suggested. Thank you.

 

Comment 11: Ln182 – change “costumes” to customs”

How addressed: Done.

 

Comment 12: Ln 173-191: The remote sensing methods for presumably a single analysis don’t need to be described twice in sections 2.3 and 2.4. Are the PL and CH delineations necessary to spatially represent the “communities” from an SES perspective? Greater explanation will be helpful for readers not familiar with these SES’s or may be coming from a different frame of reference where “communities” have more specific and standardized geographic boundaries.

How addressed: Thank you very much for the suggestion, we agree that this might have not been clear enough and have added more explanation to this section.

We wanted to make explicit that for the second analysis, we only used four cover classes (milpa, urban forest, and water) as we were mostly interested in documenting the change in milpa and forest covers within the specific area where communities carry out their productive activities. These areas would be where most changes from expanding or abandoning milpas would be detected.

In addition, the focal or buffer delimitations around communities made possible doing equivalent comparisons between "productive areas", excluding those that would have not been used by locals. As we explained in that part of the methods, we based the area on the average distance they report to walk to their milpas, land that is customary used by locals, and our knowledge of local land use.

 

Comment 13: Results Section: The figures, tables, results text could be condensed to facilitate direction comparison for the three framings of overall PA change, PL community change, and CH community change. Currently, the results section doesn’t provide these direct comparisons

How addressed: Thanks for the suggestion. To facilitate the comparison of the resource management trends from the community inside and outside the reserve, we have represented the results in table 3 as a set of graphs, which are now figure 5. We believe these graphs provide a direct and easy comparison to visually interpret the most relevant trends on management strategies, number of activities on those strategies, and type of activities carried out before and after the PA, inside and outside.

 

Comment 14: Ln 362 – 380: Shifting to discussion of land sparing vs. land sharing approaches. This language has not been previously introduced within the manuscript for OMYK protected area. Need to provide a stronger intro of how the study area fits into the land sparing / land sharing paradigms.

How addressed: Thank you for noticing that we had not mentioned this in the Introduction. We have included several sentences in the introduction to contextualize the argument for the discussion. We now say (lines 80-91):

In addition to reducing deforestation and maintaining the ecological integrity of ecosystems, there has been a paradigm shift in how PAs should operate: from the island approach or "fencing nature" where the use of resources is spatially restricted, to the so-cial-ecological approach or creating "networks of nature" that transcend the PAs boundaries [14,15]. Under the latter vision, PAs should acknowledge the complexity of social-ecological interactions and conserve resources for the benefit of people and nature, and integrate local interests and participation into conservation projects [16]. As Mertz and Mertens argue [17], this paradigm shift is part of the debate on whether spared landscapes without any human interference (island approach) are better at conserving natural forests and habitats for endangered species than shared landscapes (social-ecological approach), where agriculture and forests are both present and interact, such as shifting cultivation or other agroforestry systems in the tropics.

We also modified this paragraph (lines 142-146):

Once the PA was established, one of the main regulations on land use prohibited milpas, as they were perceived by conservation authorities as the main threat to old-growth forest conservation [29,30]. This regulation reproduces dichotomies, such as the spatial segregation of conservation and agricultural activities, promoted by the land-sparing paradigm [31].

 

 Comment 15: Ln 388: Again, for readers unfamiliar with this SES, need to explain that charcoal production is a “less traditional activity”

How addressed: We have expanded our explanation in the Introduction about the natural resources management strategies and the characteristics of the economic activities, including charcoal production.

 

Comment 16: Ln 385: What is CO-NANP?

How addressed: Thanks for noticing that we didn’t explain what CONANP is. We noy say:

According to the National Commission for Natural Protected Areas (CONANP), the institution in charge of managing the PA, the fires were caused by charcoal production activities in one of those communities.

 

Comment 17: LN 394: “Contradicting our original prediction…”. Actually, the Introduction as currently written does not make clear predictions, it simply indicates that this is built on other modeled predictions. The objectives/questions/predictions within the Introduction need to be clarified.

How addressed:  This comment is related to a previous concern raised by you (comment 7). We agree that for this paper we are not statistically testing predictions but rather analyzing the effect of the land-use restrictions on vegetation cover and household management strategies. To avoid confusions we clarified the objectives and eliminated the referred statement.

 

Comment 18: Ln 437-438: Say more about why the “win-win” discourse in conservation needs to be challenged. Don’t disagree – but this statement implies as a given without providing explanation.

How addressed: We have included a couple of sentences explaining more in detail this win-win discourse that has been around conservation for several decades. We say (lines 648-653):

Emphasizing trade-offs is also key to challenging the win-win discourse in conservation and human well-being [23]. In the field of conservation, for many decades there has been an attempt to build an argument around conservation policy options that generate a positive scenario for all stakeholders. First it was with the integrated conservation and development programs (ICDP) in the 1990s. Then, ten years later, the same argument was built around the application of payments for ecosystem services (PES).  

 

Comment 19: Ln 443-449: Good discussion on the potential downsides to increasingly specialized focus on a single productive activity – tourism. But, it also raises the question of whether or not households are able to re-diversify their activities if tourism suddenly becomes limited. Is this feasible or infeasible for households?

How addressed: This is completely feasible. In fact, although it has been a relatively small period, tourism suddenly became limited with the COVID19 pandemic. In this case the shock of the drastic reduction of visitors to the area only lasted 18 months. Although tourist levels have not reached pre-pandemic levels, the tourism industry in the region is recovering. What seems to us that could complicate the possibility of re-diversify is when for several generations the economic activity is based on a single activity, which for the area would most likely be tourism. As with everything, there is a learning curve. It is possible that new generations, after several generations have passed, may not have the local ecological knowledge, and may even lose their own language and cultural traditions, an increasingly recurrent aspect in modern globalized societies.

 

Comment 20: SI Table – what is “interachange”?

How addressed:  Interchange (also called “swap”) refers to the change in location of a land cover transition. This is, within a landscape or study area, the amount of area of a land cover class lost in one site is equivalent to the amount of area gain for the same class in a different location. This transition would not be accounted as “net change” (the gain minus the loss area of a cover class), which in consequence underestimates the total change of that class, and therefore this variable is usually reported. We have changed the name to “Swap”, which is more common in the land cover change literature.

Reviewer 3 Report

Congratulations on the hard work! Some comments:

Page 1, lines 34-35: I do not understand. You have to reformulate.

Page 2, lines 94-98: I do not understand. You have to further explain and clarify.

Page 3, lines 111-113: What happens in-between, that is between 2003 and 2015? What happens after 2015? You have to be more specific.

Page 4, lines 165-169: What caused the fires? What happened to the damaged areas?

Pages 4-5, lines 181-184: I do not understand. You have to better explain.

Page 5, lines 196-197: Why are the interviews so old (2015)?

Page 7, lines 243-246: The explanation is insufficient. By natural succession, do you mean natural regeneration? Was there any planting?

Conclusion: What about the well-being of Yucatec Maya households? Has it increased, decreased or remained unchanged?

Conclusion: You have to better explain the specialization in activities because your Table 3 shows an increase in mixed strategy.

Conclusion: Resilience is a general and vague concept. What is your definition of resilience? Resilience could be the change in land-use practices that keeps the SES sustainable. If that were the case, why would the establishment of OMYK compromise the resilience of the SES?

Author Response

REVIEWER 3

 Comment 1: Congratulations on the hard work! Some comments:

How addressed: Thank you for the comment.

 

Comment 2: Page 1, lines 34-35: I do not understand. You have to reformulate.

How addressed: We have changed the phrase because it was incomplete and confusing. We now say:

To assess the changes of land-use practices in the areas surrounding the communities inside and outside the PA, and their change over time (from 2003 to 2015), we used remote sensing analysis and semi-structured interviews.

 

Comment 3: Page 2, lines 94-98: I do not understand. You have to further explain and clarify.

How addressed: Thanks for the comment. We changed the explanation about the characteristics of natural resources management and the economic activities implemented by the communities we studied. We now say (lines 110-129):

For this we conducted a study in a PA in the Yucatan Peninsula that has two decades of being officially decreed as protected. People living in the area are indigenous Yucatec Maya, and most preserve many of their ancient cultural traditions, such as language, religious ceremonies and traditional natural resource management. As it has been widely documented [27,28], Yucatec Mayas have historically managed biodiversity through a diversified strategy of natural resource use. Within this strategy, producers take ad-vantage of the simultaneous development of various productive activities both for self-sufficiency and the market while ensuring food security and subsistence. Diversification reduces the risks associated with external socioeconomic shocks (e.g., changes in prices or lower demand) or ecological events (e.g., hurricanes or droughts) [28,29]. Yucatec Maya natural resource management involves a lower output per unit of land compared with specialized resource management. However, the Yucatec Maya natural resource management strategy has great value because the permanent, dynamic system is based on the benefits of diversity [27,28]. Therefore, instead of maximizing areas of monoculture or specializing in one economic activity, the strategy maintains diversity through the utilization of many land-use units available for different economic activities.

 

Comment 4: Page 3, lines 111-113: What happens in-between, that is between 2003 and 2015? What happens after 2015? You have to be more specific.

How addressed: By taking two specific points (2003 and 2015) in the history of this PA, we are comparing what the vegetation cover was like and what productive activities households were implementing at the beginning of the PA and a decade later. Obviously what happened between the two years we understand it as a gradual process of change. Young secondary vegetation went through different successional processes, as well as households were abandoning or incorporating economic activities to their natural resource management strategy. We know in general terms what happened after 2015, but we do not have specific data in terms of LUCC and implementation of economic activities. We noted a trend towards greater specialization to tourism, a trend that was drastically slowed by the COVID19 pandemic. Since 2019 we have not returned to the site, but we have spoken with the authorities in charge of managing the PA and with some families in the community. As most places depending heavily on tourism, the last 2 years have been complicated. Nowadays, the arrival of tourists is just beginning to recover.

 

Comment 5: Page 4, lines 165-169: What caused the fires? What happened to the damaged areas?

How addressed: According to the official information, the fires originated in part due to unregulated/unsupervised charcoal production conducted by a community located outside the northeastern part of the reserve. This, in synergy with the excess of woody biomass accumulated in the area due to hurricanes Emily and Wilma (in 2005), generated the conditions for these unusually large forest fires. This was included in the discussion, but we have expanded and clarified this explanation (L. 390-395). As explained in the text (L.  247 to 250), the main consequence of these fires was the loss of older and mature forest patches, which explains the gain of secondary vegetation by 2015.

 

Comment 6: Pages 4-5, lines 181-184: I do not understand. You have to better explain.

How addressed: Thank you for noting this mistake. It was confusing and repetitive. We have rewritten this part of the paragraph for clarity. Now it reads (lines 274-280):

To determine the surrounding areas for each village, we delimited a 1 km2 buffer around the largest concentration of households as focal area. We determined this buffer based on the average distance that locals reported to walk to their milpas [29] and our knowledge on the locations used for productive activities, and confirming it did not include areas used by other communities. These focal delimitations around communities made possible having equivalent comparisons between the "productive areas" of the both communities, where most changes would be detected.

 

 Comment 7: Page 5, lines 196-197: Why are the interviews so old (2015)?

How addressed: Although the interviews and vegetation maps are from 2015, they constitute the last comparable point in time to the previous analyses we have carried out in the area (1999 and 2003, as cited in García-Frapolli 2007). One relevant point is that the two analyzed periods represent the before and the after of protected area, which provides a natural experimental design. This information allowed to match both, the temporal and spatial scale for both communities and was useful to answer the overall research question and the interpretation of the results. It seems to us that the analysis comparing these points in time with the same methodology is relevant to show a clear picture of what is happening in terms of changes in vegetation, both within the protected area and in its zone of influence, and how it is linked to changes in natural resource management strategies.

We consider this is valuable information regardless of the time when it was collected.

 

Comment 8: Page 7, lines 243-246: The explanation is insufficient. By natural succession, do you mean natural regeneration? Was there any planting?

How addressed: Yes, we refer to natural regeneration. Although some restoration experiments have been conducted at a very small scale and in a particular location within the area, no planting or reforestation practices have been carried out. We are positive that the detected forest recovery is due to natural regeneration. These explanations have been included in the text (lines 365-369).

 

Comment 9: Conclusion: What about the well-being of Yucatec Maya households? Has it increased, decreased or remained unchanged?

How addressed: Good question. Thinking about objective well-being, most local households have increased their monetary income, therefore have more access to goods, such as cars, smart phones, services such as cable-tv, and so on. There’s no doubt that monetarily speaking, they are well off. Thinking about subjective well-being, having more money (specially men) has modified certain aspects that we have observed in the community, but also some members have told us in informal chats. First of all, some activities that were done jointly as part of the obligations of having land and natural resource rights, such as community clean-up work once a month, have been monetized. Now people can pay a fine and not do the work. We have been told that these changes have undermined the sense of community and the logic of obligations. It’s very difficult to argue if this is good or bad for the well-being of the community.

But in our view, the most important change is that with higher income, male alcohol consumption in the community has increased dramatically. Before tourism became so important in the community, there was a rule imposed by the women that drinking alcohol in the community was forbidden. This rule was imposed for several decades. Anyone who wanted to drink alcohol had to leave and do it in another town. Nowadays, this rule is no longer enforced as people have more money and feel more empower. Now it is common to see young and adult men drinking alcohol every day of the week. From the comments of several women, the level of domestic violence has increased significantly in the community. Since our perspective, alcoholism has become one of the main threats to the local well-being.

In summary, we do not have the elements to affirm whether households’ well-being increased, remained the same or deteriorated. It would be very interesting to do a formal research on this matter. However, in the Discussion we do say:

At the same time, the specialization registered in PL on a single productive activity that is temporal and variable, limits households’ economic options and self-sufficient sources which in the face of disturbance events, can increase the system’s vulnerability

 

Comment 10: Conclusion: You have to better explain the specialization in activities because your Table 3 shows an increase in mixed strategy.

How addressed: You are right, thank you for pointing this out. This argument was built based on the number of economic activities that households are carrying out at present. In the case of Punta Laguna, almost 75% of households only carry out one or two economic activities. We have changed the sentence in the Conclusion. We now say (lines 690-695):

In PL while tourism has positively contributed to the local income, it has also encouraged economic specialization, since nowadays almost 75% of households only carry out one or two economic activities. discouraged the diversification in their management strategy, particularly the abandonment of traditional activities. This economic specialization can pose risks towards control of their livelihoods and increase dependency on external agents, such as the tourist industry.

 

Comment 11: Conclusion: Resilience is a general and vague concept. What is your definition of resilience? Resilience could be the change in land-use practices that keeps the SES sustainable. If that were the case, why would the establishment of OMYK compromise the resilience of the SES?

How addressed: We agree that resilience is a difficult concept. It can explain well theoretically the changes and thresholds that exist in social-ecological systems, but it is very tricky to implement. Therefore, we have removed this concept from the discussion and conclusion sections. Also, because as the Editor pointed out to us, our assertions were too strong and do not hold up from a very specific case study. Consequently, we simply highlight that in terms of vegetation cover and deforestation, the establishment of the PA was very effective, but it also reduced the diversity of the livelihoods of the community located within the PA. This is an aspect that it is important in the face of disturbances such as the COVID19 pandemic and the drastic decrease in the flow of tourists to the PA.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the updates.