John Martin Anderies, Ph.D. - US grants

Traditional scientific research is focused within academic disciplines with a marked divide between social and natural sciences. However, scientific research is now crossing disciplinary boundaries, seeing human and natural systems as inextricably linked. This project is ultimately concerned with understanding long-term change in linked human-natural systems. Rapid change is often obvious, whereas long-term change is difficult to observe and even more difficult to study because scientific data typically span, at most, a few decades. Archaeology, on the other hand, collects and analyzes data on human societies and their environments that span centuries or even millennia. Thus, archaeology has the potential to play a unique role in developing and testing scientific models on such topics as demography, economy, and social stability.
However, the use of archaeological knowledge for these purposes is limited by the inherent complexities on the data. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to execute meaningful analyses that integrate primary data from many archaeological research projects. This research initiates the process of building a cyberinfrastructure for archaeology that would incorporate both new and extant archaeological databases and would use systematized archaeological knowledge and sophisticated computer methods to transcend the problems of data comparability.
The first component of this grant is a broad-based workshop that will attempt to build a scientific consensus on a vision for a cyberinfrastructure of archaeology, assess the professional and technical challenges, and outline a strategy for achieving that vision. The second component is in-depth exploration of a limited archaeological problem by a team of archaeologists and computer scientists. This component seeks to understand the detailed sorts of knowledge needed to compare and integrate actual data from different field projects (e.g., their preservation and collection strategies) and how to systematically represent that knowledge for computer use. The third component will examine the technical problems posed by archaeological data integration in light of the experience of other disciplines.
Scientific Merit. A knowledge-based archaeological data-integration system encompassing both new and extant datasets could provide Internet access to extensive social and environmental data archives. Researchers could extract databases of analytically comparable observations, propelling synthetic research to a new level and enabling researchers across scientific disciplines to address large-scale and long-term questions with a level of empirical support that has been unthinkable. This research will also contribute novel computer methods of data integration applicable to other scientific domains in which data are inconsistently collected.
Broader Impacts. The proposed system has the potential to transform a key component of undergraduate education in archaeology. Employing this knowledge-based system, critical thinking exercises could use large-scale research datasets instead of the "toy" problems usually analyzed.
The proposed system has far-reaching impacts on the infrastructure of social and natural science. It would provide a means to maintain the long-term utility of irreplaceable data in the face of inadequate documentation and rapidly changing technology. Academic, governmental, tribal and private enterprises would all be active consumers of the resulting data integration system. By providing scholars in diverse fields with meaningful access to long-term data on society, population, and environment, archaeology can help explain the complex human and social dynamics that have constituted today's social world and have shaped the modern environment.

An interdisciplinary team of investigators carry out an
undergraduate training initiative at Arizona State University.
The training plan intimately combines new cross-disciplinary
courses and summer research programs. The former are constructed
to allow maximal participation among undergraduate cadres, and
facilitate life science majors to achieve a minor in mathematics,
and, likewise, mathematics majors to enrich their education with
a minor in bioscience. The summer research program is a
competitive enterprise involving at least eight ASU faculty
members from life sciences, mathematics, and biophysics.
Research projects span modeling of ecological and evolutionary
processes through the new lens of stoichiometric constraints,
bio-economics, chemostat theory, and modeling of visual
perception.

This project has potential to make broad impact in both
local and global education environs. Regarding the former, the
ASU UBM team is truly interdisciplinary, with members in
mathematics, biology and biophysics, exceptionally well suited
for interdisciplinary training for undergraduates in biological
and mathematical sciences. Its collaborative efforts can provide
undergraduate and graduate students of diverse ethnic/racial
backgrounds with first-hand educational experience in
cross-disciplinary communication and exploration. As for global
impact, the proposed holistic approach (involving mathematical
biology courses at various levels and summer research projects)
in mathematical biology training can vertically integrate all the
components in the ASU education system. It is therefore expected
that this proposed program may yield many invaluable lessons to
serve mathematical bioscience education and research nationwide,
enriching the experience for the next generation of students in
this integrative and interdisciplinary scientific endeavor.

Each generation transforms an inherited social and environmental world and leaves it as a legacy to succeeding generations. Long-term interactions among social and ecological processes give rise to complex dynamics on multiple temporal and spatial scales -- cycles of change followed by relative stasis and then a new cycle of change. Within the cycles are understandable patterns and irreducible uncertainties. Neither stability nor transformation can be taken as the norm. Although these cycles can be identified, it remains uncertain what fosters stability or contributes to transformation over long cycles. What vulnerabilities can be tolerated, and which tip a system into transformation and at what scale? Resilience theorists have built an understanding of social and ecological vulnerabilities, stability, and transformation based on studies of contemporary socioecological systems. This interdisciplinary research project will examine some of these understandings by applying archaeological and ecological analyses and formal dynamical modeling. The project will be undertaken by a collaboration of archaeologists, mathematical modelers, ecologists, and environmental scientists. Archaeology is attuned to cycles of change over the lifespan of a society -- heightened inter-societal interaction, economic intensification, and large-scale anthropogenic environmental change . It therefore extends scientific observation of stability and transformation beyond all social memory. Archaeologically documented case studies in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico provide the information for investigating long-term human-environmental interactions. The project will (1) compile documentation on up to four archaeological cases, (2) examine their pan-regional connections, and (3) employ mathematical modeling and subsequent archaeological and ecological analysis to abstract the key variables and processes underlying periods of cultural stability and both rapid and protracted transformations. The empirical investigations provide substantive contexts for the models, while the models will foster insight into generalizations that are then examined in empirical contexts. This iterative process is expected to lead to insights that could not be derived from any single approach, nor can they be derived from the short time span available in contemporary study of social or ecological change.

This project will influence the refinement of theory and understanding of processes of socioecological change. First, an intensive collaboration of archaeologists specializing in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico will contribute a new level of understanding of the social and environmental interactions underlying important episodes in human history. Second, through archaeology's deep time perspective, this project will examine the utility of resilience theory as applied to coupled socioecological systems, demonstrate the value of archaeology to ecological theory, and further scientific understanding of current socioecological problems through refinement of concepts and theory. Third, this project will identify the dynamics of transformation and stability as conditioned by cultural and environmental contexts, strategies for coping with uncertainty, and varying constraints of long-term legacies. This project is expected to promote awareness of some of the human strategies for dealing with uncertainty and change as well as awareness of how human actions leave legacies of resilience or degradation. In addition, this project will immerse students in an interdisciplinary research community that will spark development of professional skills and encourage them to exchange knowledge about coupled human and environmental systems. The involvement of students and researchers from the U.S., Mexico, France, and the many nations represented in the Resilience Alliance will foster global perspectives and international collaborations. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2005 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.

Many societies have endured for long periods, successfully coping with uncertainty, disturbance, and change in the environment. Many other societies have failed in this regard. The core question addressed in this interdisciplinary research project is why some social-ecological systems are more successful in dealing with disturbances and change in the environment than others. The investigators, who come from a broad range of composed of social, physical, and engineering science fields, hypothesize that an important factor bearing on this question is a well-known phenomenon in engineering: a system cannot be robust to all classes of disturbances. Thus, in developing mechanisms to address an existing suite of uncertainties and environmental risks (becoming robust to a particular class of disturbances), society necessarily becomes vulnerable to other classes of disturbances. Through the application of several complementary quantitative techniques to a suite of mathematical models based on a large set of case studies, the research team will explore such robustness-fragility trade-offs in a range of simple irrigation societies. The research team will employ methods and insights from applied mathematics, electrical engineering (control), resource economics, archaeology, and ecology to develop an integrated approach to study how societies deal with uncertainty, disturbance, and change. The products from the project will be (1) an empirical database and a suite of formal mathematical models relating to the basic biophysical, social, and institutional characteristics of several irrigation societies, (2) a deeper understanding of how societies may become fragile as they attempt to cope with uncertainty and change in the environment, and (3) new tools for resource managers: a set of design principles for robust institutions that perform well in the face of both social and environmental disturbances.

This project will yield fundamental new knowledge concerning the interaction between human social dynamics and environmental change. It also will improve resource management practice and to enhance mathematical education. By bringing together techniques from a range of disciplines, the investigators will develop new tools for the study of social-ecological systems that are able to cope with more complexity than traditional approaches. The research results have the potential to improve resource management practices by providing tools to help predict when alternative responses to disturbance and environmental change will succeed and how they will most likely fail. Research findings will be translated into practice through the efforts of the Resilience Alliance, an international organization that produces research, educational materials, and practical tools for resource managers. The research project will contribute to ongoing activities at Arizona State University designed to enhance mathematical literacy in the life and social sciences by engaging both graduate and undergraduate students in a problem-focused, interdisciplinary research program involving mathematics, economics, engineering, ecology, and archeology. An award resulting from the FY 2005 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.

Globalization is fundamentally changing the way humans interact with natural resources. Many people no longer rely on local resources but, rather, on a set of distant resources linked through a global economic network. Unfortunately, this integration of local resource systems across several temporal and spatial scales has the potential to amplify local resource degradation problems to the global scale. Sound management of the increasingly complex global resource system requires achieving a good fit both between local intuitions and local ecological contexts and local institutions and the global context in which they are embedded. This project will combine empirical case studies of local social-ecological systems from around the globe with the development and analysis of stylized dynamic mathematical models to begin to derive general principles concerning how to best achieve such a fit. Specifically, the project will address two overarching questions: 1) what local contextual social and ecological variables are most important in determining the success or failure of local resource management institutions and 2) how does the performance of local institutions change in response to changes in larger-scale processes associated with globalization.

The project's integrated research and teaching program directed at addressing these issues will contribute to both improved resource management and enhanced mathematical literacy. Evidence continues to mount that policies based on extremely simplified, theoretical models frequently fail. Using data to judiciously add complexity to basic theoretical models, this project will systematically explore the effects of local cultural, social, economic, and ecological context on the performance of institutions and management policies and identify to which external factors local institutions are most sensitive. This understanding will improve our capacity to diagnose resource management problems, build better solutions, prevent the loss of existing institutional diversity, and maintain the integrity of the global resource system upon which we all rely. At the same time, by immersing students in research at the boundaries between natural, social, and mathematical sciences, the project will help address our nation's challenges with low mathematical literacy.
Low mathematical literacy is due, in part, to the lack of interesting context in which to apply mathematical techniques for students outside physics, chemistry, and engineering. This project will provide such context through specially-designed courses and graduate research in which students will learn mathematics by using it to address problems in the social and life sciences that really matter to them. Finally, the internet-based e-library of case studies, models, and visualization tools developed in this project will provide a valuable resource for learning mathematics through its application to problems in the social and life sciences.

Grassland degradation is a global concern, affecting not only wild species and pastoralists who rely on healthy grasslands for their survival, but also non-local people who suffer from resultant hydrological disturbances, dust storms, commodity scarcity, and social consequences of uprooted people. Livestock grazing is the dominant form of land use in Central Asia, and pastures of the Tibetan highlands are located upstream and upwind of roughly 40 percent of the world's human population. Grasslands on the Tibetan plateau usually are described as increasingly degraded. Causes for this grassland degradation are variously attributed to over-stocking of livestock, poor livestock management, historical-cultural factors, alteration of land-tenure arrangements, rapid changes in socioeconomic systems, climate change, and excessive herbivory and soil disturbance from wildlife. Prior research has yet to provide clear support for any putative causative agents, however, and previous studies have not examined interactions and complexity among these factors. As a result, policy choices to reduce or reverse grassland degradation often are made without a clear rationale and are based more on prejudice or convenience than evidence of their effectiveness. This interdisciplinary project will examine multiple correlates of grassland status and trends simultaneously, using replicated measurements at permanent plots in a multi-strata design, measuring the strength of evidence for various competing hypotheses. The investigators will link ecological measurements directly to current and recent historical actions by pastoralists, which in turn are affected by cultural norms, economic incentives, and policies of central and provincial governments. In addition to biophysical attributes of each site, livestock density and pasture usage patterns will be quantified. Each site also will be described by the particular grazing strategy employed by the pastoralist managing it, and that strategy, in turn, will be related to the complex of economic and policy incentives and historical determinants that pastoralists face. These data will be used to develop models that link broad historical, policy, economic, and cultural factors to local grassland conditions as mediated by the agency of individual pastoralists. The models can also be used to evaluate the implications of different policy interventions.

This project will deepen basic understanding of the complex interactions involving geophysical, biological, social, and policy factors and feedback systems that affect grassland status. Because multiple factors affect grasslands simultaneously and interactions are critical, the interdisciplinary, the systems-approach adopted by this project is fundamental. Enhanced understanding of this socioecological system will provide important input for policies on grassland restoration, biodiversity, and economic development in arid ecosystems worldwide. In addition to the education and training of students, the project will train a number of Tibetan field assistants, and the researchers will coordinate their work closely with local and provincial grassland and forestry officials. Direct collaboration with Chinese scientists and officials as well as facilitated workshops will enable research results to be understood by policy makers. Direct interactions with local pastoralists will allow immediate, practical applications of project results. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.

An evaluation of the materials that have been prepared for an e-book for use in teaching control system engineering is being conducted. The evaluation will examine student learning outcomes and attitudes toward an electronic textbook. Additionally, representatives from industry are reviewing the materials and providing an assessment from the industry viewpoint. Faculty at other institutions who have used portions of the electronic book in their classes are also engaged in the evaluation efforts.

Calls for preserving cultural and biological diversity regularly appear in the news. The preservation of diversity is not just a subject of study by ecologists, anthropologists, conservationists, and land managers; it is an explicit goal of social movements and governmental policies. This research project will examine how social and ecological diversity interact to influence the resilience of societies facing major changes in their social or environmental circumstances. The goal of the investigators conducting this project is to discover configurations of diversity in ecological landscapes and in forms of social organization that make systems more or less able to cope with significant environmental or social changes without undergoing an unpleasant transformation. The researchers will focus on a few important variables indicating both social diversity (integration, conformity, and hierarchy) and ecological diversity (diversity of plant and animal species and of patches on the landscape). To understand the relationships of interest, they will develop mathematical models of the interactions of key variables and conduct extensive quantitative analysis of data from empirical studies of millennium-long societal trajectories. They will examine five archaeological cases from the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico as long-term "experiments" to see how diversity in the social and ecological realms affected these societies' abilities to thrive or forced them into dramatic transformations when faced with different environmental or social stimuli. The outcomes of these analyses will provide the basis for dynamic modeling designed to investigate the broad range of conditions in which these domains of diversity contribute to varying responses to change across different time scales. Model analyses conducted using dynamical systems and numerical techniques will begin with simple social situations coupled with simple landscapes followed by step-wise modifications designed to "complexify" both social and ecological modeled landscapes. The project will move iteratively between archaeological analysis and mathematical modeling. Patterns observed in the empirical studies will inform the modeling, which will examine those relationships more abstractly. The effects predicted by the modeling then will be explored with respect to the empirical details of the case studies.

Insights about diversity in contemporary research on interacting social and ecological systems have overwhelmingly relied upon studies and observations over short time spans. This project's emphasis on case-specific, comparative analysis of long-term, regional-scale archaeological sequences in the Americas will yield new perspectives regarding important episodes in human history. This project will demonstrate the value of integrating insights from ecology and archaeology, the importance of balancing concerns for social and ecological processes, and the ability of archaeology to contribute to understanding the role of diversity in the resilience of social-ecological systems. As societies cope with inevitable change, their actions generate vulnerabilities. Lack of awareness of these dynamics can contribute to the need for costly transformations. When made more aware of the complex dynamics of change as they have functioned in the past, people can better weigh the implications of their decisions and build resilience to such vulnerabilities. This project will demonstrate how interactions associated with social and ecological diversity can inform contemporary policies dealing with sustainability, robustness, vulnerability, and transformative change. This project also will enhance education from pre-collegiate through graduate levels as students and teachers integrate knowledge derived from both the social and natural sciences and benefit from primary datasets of richly documented social and ecological analyses of diversity. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.

Long-lived coupled natural human systems (CNHs) are often distinguished by how they have evolved the right fit between their biophysical and social sub-systems. Researchers have characterized this fit in terms of the close feedbacks that enable a system to function well when faced with a known set of disturbance regimes. This project addresses a key question that naturally arises when these systems are exposed to a new set of disturbance regimes or novel change as is likely to occur with increased globalization and climate change: to what extent do the interdependencies that developed to strengthen the system's capacity to fit to a certain set of disturbances limit or enhance its capacity to refit to new conditions? To address this question, the project team will focus on a particular class of CNHs - small scale irrigation systems where the built infrastructure plays a critical role in resource provision. A multi-method approach will be employed that begins with the qualitative analysis of a large number of case studies to develop a typology of irrigation systems. A subset of previously examined exemplar cases will be revisited to examine how they have coped with new vulnerabilities that have emerged. In parallel, field experiments will be conducted with resource users and infrastructure providers that apply principles of behavioral economics to social dilemmas that emerge in irrigation systems in order to test the robustness of collective action to different stressors. These will be followed by laboratory experiments with college students to examine whether the findings can be generalized to other systems. Finally, insights from the case studies and experiments will be used to develop formal dynamic models of prototypical irrigation-based CNHs. Using tools from dynamical systems and robust control complemented by numerical experiments and simulation (including agent-based approaches), the qualitative dynamics and associated robustness-vulnerability characteristics of these systems will be studied in order to distill a set of institutional design principles for use in the development of tools for anticipatory governance.

In addition to the study of coupled natural human systems (CNHs) in its own right, this project is motivated by an important practical consideration. The pace at which social and natural systems are currently changing - driven to a large degree by globalization and climate change - has challenged the capacity of several CNHs to self-organize and respond effectively to this change. Ongoing field studies have shown that small scale farms (less than 2 hectares), which constitute 90% of farms worldwide and consume an estimated 70% of developed water supplies, are the most vulnerable to such changes. Since these farms also produce 40% of agricultural output globally and support the majority of world?s poorest people, it is essential to enhance their adaptive capacity in order to maintain food security and alleviate poverty. Focusing on the in-depth study of small-scale irrigation systems, this project pushes ideas of resource governance beyond traditional approaches. Rather than seeking the "best" policies for a specific system under a given set of shocks, it seeks to understand how CNHs cope with change under a wide range of disturbance regimes. The theoretical foundation for the project is based on a key insight from engineering: feedback (of which management and governance in CNHs are examples) can be used to stabilize a system and reduce its sensitivity to a given set of disturbances. However, this stabilizing feedback can increase sensitivity to new types of disturbances. By studying responses to a suite of disturbances, this project helps advance a more nuanced understanding of evolution of CNHs in terms of recognizing how in becoming finely-tuned to certain disturbances, systems become increasingly vulnerable to others. Building on this insight through theoretical modelling as well as case studies and field experiments from a wide variety of settings in the southwestern US, India, Nepal and Thailand, this project will develop a set of tools that will contribute to the capacity of policy makers to better anticipate emerging vulnerabilities and design learning and adaptive mechanisms to cope more effectively with change.

There is growing interest in the use of information and communication technologies for community engagement and for crowd-sourcing solutions to difficult problems through challenges and prizes. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations are being encouraged to design, deploy, manage and support appropriate online platforms to address both goals and improve economic competitiveness. These governance challenge platforms can create novel pathways for citizen participation, increase openness of governance activities, and increase both the effectiveness and legitimacy of the governing organization. Arizona State University is developing a new University-wide challenge platform to enhance community engagement and to solicit ideas from its 50,000-member University community to solve eight broad challenges, but little is known about the design, use and effects of such platforms.

The research team will engage the platform design team to incorporate the affordances required to improve the overall user experience and to test applicable theories of team composition, governance structures, legitimacy, and team capacity and commitment. Once these features have been developed, they will be used in a series of field studies designed to identify theoretical extensions and potential boundary conditions in online community engagement. The studies will initially map community participation, trace how participation spreads through the community, and test the effects of real-time feedback on the community?s participation patterns. The next phase will explore the impact of voting mechanisms on community dynamics, on perceptions of governance accountability, and on more sophisticated forms of community involvement. Finally, relationships between team formation, structure, diversity and effectiveness will be investigated focusing on the quality of the solutions generated.

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 13-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum and the G8 countries Heads of Research Councils. The Belmont Forum is a high level group of the world's major and emerging funders of global environmental change research and international science councils. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international environmental research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. The G8 Heads of Research Councils developed a funding framework to support multilateral research projects that address global challenges in ways that are beyond the capacity of national or bilateral activities. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

Working together in an inaugural call of the International Opportunities Fund, the Belmont Forum and G8HORCs have provided support for research projects that seek to deliver knowledge needed for action to mitigate and adapt to detrimental environmental change and extreme hazardous events that relate to either Freshwater Security or Coastal Vulnerability. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries and that bring together natural scientists, social scientists and research users (e.g., policy makers, regulators, NGOs, communities and industry).

This award supports research activities that will create a better understanding of the underlying socio-ecological adaptation processes in coastal regions that facilitate effective adaptation to coastal vulnerabilities. Adaptation practices can have long term and unintended consequences for the vulnerability of society, specific stakeholders, and/or ecosystems. Understanding how feedbacks occur between risk from biophysical changes, cognitive processes and adaptation practices can facilitate more effective adaptation strategies. This project will adopt a socio-ecological systems approach to model practices and feedbacks in response to climate change in three coastal regions in France, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. This will be done by assessing interactions among (1) actual risks posed by climate change; (2) cognitive factors such as perceived risk and adaptive capacity; (3) adaptations; and (4) situational learning where decision makers and stakeholders participate in modeling processes. Multi-scale models, ranging in scale from individuals to regional planning bodies, will be developed to study cognitive shifts that contribute to adaptation practices. This project will contribute toward improving vulnerability and adaptation assessment and decisions by focusing on the way decisions are made and the long term implications consequences of decisions and practices.

Urban water-supply systems consist of both physical infrastructure and policies that govern their use. These systems are designed to be adaptable to a wide range of supply and demand conditions. However, climatic and social shifts are placing new stresses on water-supply systems that require substantial changes, also called transitions, to maintain system performance. This research analyzes transitions across 12 large-scale urban water systems in the United States to achieve two goals: 1) to better document the interactions among various environmental and human factors that may prompt transition, and 2) to identify which infrastructure and policy design choices can foster practical transitions to increase sustainability. To accomplish these goals this project will gather and analyze long-term human and environmental data to synthesize relationships and trends, and develop two complementary models to identify pathways that can lead to a sustainable water-supply transition. This project will directly involve stakeholders in multiple stages of the research to both learn from their experiences and ensure that outputs meet their needs. This project also will provide education and training opportunities to help students develop the competencies needed to collaborate across fields, a skill that is essential to tackle current environmental challenges.

The proposed research utilizes a "convergence" approach to investigate how integrated urban water systems can be managed effectively as they face increasing pressures from climate change, population growth, and other environmental factors. This research will involve a longitudinal analysis of system stressors, an examination of hydrological detection and change, construction of a Bayesian model to forecast the probability of stressors exceeding thresholds for transition, and development of a dynamic model to identify promising design choices. This project will benefit urban water-supply systems in four ways by: 1) combining institutional analysis with dynamic modeling to gain new insights into the role of institutions in shaping system dynamics; 2) linking the detection and attribution of hydrological change to watershed and policy processes, which will result in new knowledge about the drivers and the impacts of hydrological change; 3) synthesizing quantitative and qualitative data, stakeholder knowledge, and inductive and deductive modeling approaches to enhance system performance; 4) identifying how specific infrastructure and institutional design choices affect system resilience and transition probability. Knowledge relating design to outcomes is key because, although cities cannot control the dynamics of hydrological or human systems, they can alter design choices. Examining urban water transitions can also offer general insights for other socio-environmental challenges where preemptive intervention will be beneficial.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. The Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, and integrates the co-production of knowledge. This award fulfills part of that aim.

The Arctic is warming on average twice as rapidly as the rest of the planet, which is leading to significant changes in sea ice to which local communities must respond. Beringia, a region of the Arctic encompassing US and Russian territory, is expected to experience some of the highest variability in sea ice conditions in the coming century. This project focuses on the question: how do we design better and more flexible governance and infrastructure to adapt to changing Arctic conditions? To answer this question, the team is taking a convergence approach to forecast potential changes in the Arctic sea ice environment and the impacts on social and ecological systems resulting from those changes and identify adaptive strategies to enhance resilience to those impacts. The project fully engages local and Indigenous communities and decision makers in the Arctic throughout the research process to generate information and models about critical hot spots of sea ice change relevant to local communities. This will help build local and regional governance capacity and allow the researchers to model and predict the robustness of communities to forecast changes.

Coproduction of knowledge between local and Indigenous communities and scientists, and collaborative research across disciplinary and national boundaries, will be used to address four key research questions: 1) How do people understand and perceive changing sea ice, and how do they adapt to variability in ice conditions? 2) Where are the current critical hot spots of variability in sea ice, and where will they be in the future as the environment and communities change? 3) How will governmental and non-governmental organizations in the region navigate changing sea ice conditions and interact with communities to respond to their changing needs? and 4) What features of the existing, and potential, social-ecological systems are robust/fragile to forecast changes in sea ice? This project will document diverse narratives and critical policy challenges around biogeophysical changes and associated livelihood and economic opportunities/costs between and within communities through grounded ethnography and cultural consensus analysis. Satellite data will be used to highlight "hot spots" of sea ice variability and provide a starting point for community and stakeholders' discussions of "change". Interviews with governance actors will identify priorities and responses and generate spatially explicit policy networks. A multi-agent model will link these analyses and be utilized to explore the diversity of issues, projections of change, and fragility or robustness of communities and the infrastructure systems they rely on. Through this research, the project will derive new understandings of community and institutional responses to change, the impacts of spatial and temporal variability within a trend, and robustness-fragility trade-offs that can be applied to other regions as they navigate transitions around the globe in the Anthropocene.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).

Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) is one of NSF's 10 Big Ideas. NNA projects address convergence scientific challenges in the rapidly changing Arctic. This Arctic research is needed to inform the economy, security and resilience of the Nation, the larger region and the globe. NNA empowers new research partnerships from local to international scales, diversifies the next generation of Arctic researchers, enhances efforts in formal and informal education, and integrates the co-production of knowledge where appropriate. This award fulfills part of that aim by addressing interactions among social systems, the natural environment, and the built environment in the following NNA focus areas: Arctic Residents, Data and Observation, Education, Forecasting, and Resilient Infrastructure.

This project applies convergent methodologies to study the Arctic Frozen Commons (FC), defined as the ice, snow, and permafrost landscapes collectively used and governed by communities and numerous non-local stakeholders. While significant knowledge exists around biophysical characteristics of the cryosphere, this remains largely separate from its cultural and social understandings among local and Indigenous communities, culminating in poor integration around the use and governance of Frozen Commons in a rapidly changing Arctic. An enhanced understanding of interacting processes in the social, cultural, technological, environmental, and governance domains for frozen commons is critical to framing sustainable Arctic futures. This project advances transdisciplinary research by converging Arts, Science, Local and Indigenous Knowledge systems (ArtSLInK) for developing a deeper understanding of FC resilience and sustainability. ArtSLInK encompasses synchronous, equitable, co-productive engagement across the social and natural sciences, the arts and place-based local and Indigenous knowledge systems, each with their distinct modes of exploration and expression.

This project integrates social, technological, and environmental domains of frozen commons, and explicitly engages with governance implications across diverse worldviews and management narratives. The project addresses three research questions: 1) What FC are recognized by culturally diverse Indigenous and local communities and regional stakeholders, 2) How are they governed within specific cultural domains?, and 3) What are the major sociocultural, environmental, technological, and infrastructural driving forces and their interrelations that affect the resilience and sustainability of FC? The project pursues the following objectives: (1) to identify and inventory community relevant FC; (2) to situate knowledge of FC using a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) framework; (3) to understand interactions between sociocultural, environmental, and technology infrastructure domains affecting the availability, quality, and use of FC; and (4) to use integrated modeling approaches to determine sources of resilience and sustainability for FC under changing conditions. The project applies a transdisciplinary and comparative research framework for two rural-urban community pairs in Russia and the U.S. (Alaska) that are representative of different community sizes, governance regimes, socioeconomic arrangements, and geographies.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.