Farmers of the Nuosu Yi ethnic group in the Upper Baiwu watershed report reductions in the availability of local forest resources. A team of interdisciplinary scientists worked in partnership with this community to assess the type and extent of social-ecological change in the watershed and to identify key drivers of those changes. Here, we combine a framework for institutional analysis with resilience concepts to assess system dynamics and interactions among resource users, resources, and institutions over the past century. The current state of this system reflects a legacy of past responses to institutional disturbances initiated at the larger, national system scale. Beginning with the Communist Revolution in 1957 and continuing through the next two decades, centralized forest regulations imposed a mismatch between the scale of management and the scale of the ecological processes being managed. A newly implemented forest property rights policy is shifting greater control over the management of forest resources to individuals in rural communities. Collective forest users will be allowed to manage commodity forests for profit through the transfer of long-term leases to private contractors. Villagers are seeking guidance on how to develop sustainable and resilient forest management practices under the new policy, a responsibility returned to them after half a century and with less abundant and fewer natural resources, a larger and aggregated population, and greater influence from external forces. We assess the watershed's current state in light of the past and identify future opportunities to strengthen local institutions for governance of forest resources.

Small, irregular terraces on hillslopes, or terracettes, are common landscape features throughout west central China. Despite their prevalence, there is limited understanding of the nature of these topographic features, the processes that form them, and the role humans played in their formation. We used an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the geology, ecology, and cultural history of terracette development within Jiuzhaigou National Park, Sichuan Province, China. Terracettes occur on south facing, 20° slopes at 2500 m elevation, which appears to coincide with places people historically preferred to build villages. Ethnographic interviews suggest that traditional swidden agricultural cycles removed tree roots, causing the loess sediments to lose cohesion, slump, and the terrace risers to retreat uphill over time. This evidence is supported by landslide debris at terracette faces. Archaeological analysis of terracette sites reveal remains of rammed spread soil structures, bones, stone tools, and ceramics dating from at least 2200 years before present within a distinct paleosol layer. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating of terracette sediments ranged in age from between 1500 and 2000 14C yr BP and between 16 and 0.30"ka, respectively. These multiple lines of evidence indicate a long history of human habitation within Jiuzhaigou National Park and taken together, suggest strong links between terracette formation and human-landuse interactions.