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We investigated the relationships of land tenure, biological, cultural and spatial variables and their effect on the intensity of management of 20 edible plants used by the Santa Maria Tecomavaca community in Oaxaca State, Mexico. We developed a non-linear generalized model showing that land ownership, cultural importance and biological characteristics of a plant are the most significant factors influencing farmers' decisions to intensify management of plant resources. On common land, species with high cultural importance and long life cycles are managed intensively, while, regardless of cultural importance, species with short life cycles are simply gathered. On land where particular people have an acknowledged right of use, species with long life cycles are always managed at an intermediate level of intensity regardless of their cultural importance, while for species with short life cycles, management intensity tends to slightly decrease as cultural importance increases. Even though management is generally more intensive in lands where individuals have use rights, as expected from the “supervised collective action model”, culturally important resources are more intensively managed in communal areas, probably as a result of a long tradition of consumption and of their economic importance.
