SEES Fellows: Understanding the Dynamics of Resilience in a Social-Ecological System

SEES 研究员：了解社会生态系统的复原力动态

• 批准号: 1415130
• 负责人: Melissa Eitzel
• 金额: $ 52.04万
• 依托单位: University of California-Santa Cruz
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2020-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1415130&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SEES; Fellows; Understanding; Dynamics; Resilience

The project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This fellowship project examines the dynamics of social and ecological resilience. Scientists have long sought to understand how human societies and ecosystems respond to and recover from disruptive events such as natural disasters, economic collapse, war, and changing physical climate. As research in both the natural and social sciences has progressed, it has become clear that human societies and ecosystems are inextricably connected or coupled. Likewise, our examination of the processes and components that influence a system's resilience in the face of disruption must incorporate data from both the social and ecological components of the system. Despite this recognition of the complexity of resilience, it is difficult to find sufficiently comprehensive, multi-year data that includes unpredictable disruptive events. Mazvihwa, Zimbabwe is uniquely situated to provide such data because an ongoing community-based research project has been collecting data about the area's social and ecological conditions since 1980. Mazvihwa has also undergone several significant system shocks (including dramatic change in public health and land access and economic booms/busts) in the last 30 years making it an ideal site for studying resilience. Understanding the dynamics of resilience in coupled social and ecological systems may help communities, cities, and nations better plan for and manage unexpected and disruptive change so that negative consequences are minimized.This research draws on Mazvihwa's remarkably robust dataset that tracks human demography, health, nutrition, agricultural practices, rainfall, land use choices, woodland dynamics, household assets, and land tenure in the area over the last 30 years. The quantitative data are modelled using multiple techniques (including a state-and-transition model, a hierarchical statistical state-space model, and an agent-based model using cellular automata) to allow for a robust exploration of resilience measurements. The researcher will also gather qualitative data that captures community members' experiences with change and resilience and experiment with a variety of techniques for incorporating these qualitative data into the quantitative models. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data provide an even richer understanding of the resilience dynamics at work in this system. Finally, the researcher will use the models to develop a decision support tool that will help community members understand tradeoffs between land use choices and better plan for their future.

该项目得到了 NSF 科学、工程和可持续发展教育研究员 (SEES Fellows) 计划的支持，其目标是帮助实现所需的发现，为实现环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来解决这些问题挑战。可持续性科学是一个新兴领域，旨在解决在不损害环境、不牺牲子孙后代满足其需求的能力的情况下满足人类需求的挑战。强大的科学队伍需要受过跨学科研究和思维教育和培训的个人，特别是在可持续发展科学领域。在 SEES 奖学金的支持下，该项目将使一位有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续发展相关的独立研究生涯中确立自己的地位。 该奖学金项目研究社会和生态恢复力的动态。 长期以来，科学家们一直试图了解人类社会和生态系统如何应对自然灾害、经济崩溃、战争和自然气候变化等破坏性事件并从中恢复。随着自然科学研究和社会科学研究的进步，人类社会和生态系统之间密不可分的联系或耦合已经变得越来越清楚。同样，我们对影响系统在面临破坏时的弹性的过程和组件的检查必须纳入来自系统的社会和生态组件的数据。 尽管认识到复原力的复杂性，但很难找到足够全面的、包含不可预测的破坏性事件的多年数据。 津巴布韦马兹维赫瓦拥有得天独厚的地理位置，可以提供此类数据，因为自 1980 年以来，一项正在进行的社区研究项目一直在收集有关该地区社会和生态条件的数据。马兹维赫瓦还经历了几次重大的系统冲击（包括公共卫生和土地使用权方面的巨大变化）过去 30 年的经济繁荣/萧条）使其成为研究复原力的理想场所。 了解社会和生态系统耦合的弹性动态可能有助于社区、城市和国家更好地规划和管理意外的破坏性变化，从而最大限度地减少负面影响。这项研究利用了 Mazvihwa 非常强大的数据集，该数据集跟踪人类人口统计、健康、过去 30 年该地区的营养、农业实践、降雨量、土地利用选择、林地动态、家庭资产和土地保有权。 使用多种技术（包括状态和转换模型、分层统计状态空间模型和使用元胞自动机的基于代理的模型）对定量数据进行建模，以允许对弹性测量进行稳健的探索。研究人员还将收集定性数据，捕捉社区成员在变革和复原力方面的经验，并尝试各种技术将这些定性数据纳入定量模型。 定性和定量数据的结合提供了对该系统中工作弹性动态的更丰富的理解。 最后，研究人员将使用这些模型开发决策支持工具，帮助社区成员了解土地利用选择和更好的未来规划之间的权衡。