Ann P. Kinzig - US grants

Abstract

99-10620
Kinzig

Workshop: Sustaining and Valuing Natural Resources

Environmental goods and services have fueled economic growth and serve as the basis for human well being. Yet much of this "natural capital" is unpriced, and therefore frequently undervalued, leading to its use or degradation in excess of that which would best serve the public good. Methods for proper valuation of these services are needed, together with an increased understanding of the biogeophysical factors that form their bases. Natural and social scientists have been collaborating on these questions from over a decade, but these collaborations have been isolated and limited. At present there is no common understanding among scholars as to the most important unanswered questions or most fruitful directions for future research. This interdisciplinary workshop will assess the current literature on natural capital and its valuation and identify the most crucial gaps in that literature. This assessment is intended to serve as the basis for a larger effort in 2000 that will produce a comprehensive research agenda for the field.

The goal is to create a collaborative, multi-investigator consortium to address the complex question of how environmental stress is transduced through organisms to influence their distribution in both time and space. The study system is the rocky intertidal habitat of the northeast Pacific, an environment that is one of the most stressful and physiologically challenging on Earth. During field experiments on the U.S. coast of the northeast Pacific, data will be collected to generate a predictive model of the interaction of physiological stress, climate and community structure in the rocky intertidal zone.

The project integrates the effort of four scientists: an ecological physiologist (Helmuth), an integrative and molecular physiologist (Hofmann), a computational/mathematical ecologist (Kinzig) and a community ecologist (Menge). Three specific incubation activities are included: (1) Travel to meetings to plan the project and integrate the components of the project, (2) development of techniques essential to the success of a full proposal and (3) the recruitment of a climatologist to the project to assist with modeling small-scale weather patterns at the intertidal field sites. The project also includes a training component. Graduate students will be involved in one of the planning meetings and will assist in developing the new techniques required for the full proposal. These techniques include: optimization of the use of an infrared camera to record body temperatures of individual animals, development of a biochemical analyses of stress proteins that will allow high through-put processing and the development of a GIS-based model for the project. This collaboration meets the criteria established for the Biocomplexity theme and stands to contribute greatly to scientific understanding of the interaction of organisms with their environment and the biological consequences of changes induced by natural or anthropogenic forces.

Abstract

00-73653
Kinzig

Workshop: Developing a research agenda for linking biogeophysical and socioeconomic systems

Humans have become a global biogeochemical force, with a large and growing influence on the dynamics and functioning of the Earth's biosphere. At the same time, there is an increasing recognition of the extent to which environmental goods and services (e.g., water purification, pollination, pathogen control) have fueled economic growth and benefited humans. Many of the most compelling interdisciplinary questions on environmental systems lie at the interface of ecological sciences and human sciences. This grant will support an extensive cross-disciplinary dialog among natural and socioeconomic scientists in order to develop a prioritized research agenda for this emerging field of inquiry.

Agrarian transformations represent the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's terrestrial environment during the past 10,000 years. Many current conceptualizations of these transformations assume a simple linear model, however, positing that change is driven by present-day economic, demographic, and technological conditions. This interdisciplinary research project will trace the effects of the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture at six sites in the U.S., with comparisons also made with comparable sites in Mexico and France. The U.S. sites are members of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. This project incorporates an integrated, long-term cycle that includes land-use change affecting landscapes, altered landscapes affecting ecological processes, and both influencing the ways in which humans monitor and respond to their surroundings, which engender further cycles of change. The central objective of this research is to identify and quantify the ways in which these integrated cycles differ across cultures, across biogeographic regions, and across time. A suite of quantitative and narrative analyses will be used to identify the prime determinants of long-term dynamics, present-day patterns, and reservoirs of ecological and social resilience in these systems. Analytical approaches will include structural-equation modeling, analysis of spatial and causal effects, and cross-site comparisons of case studies. As a practical test of the project's results, approaches and insights that includes an emphasis on eco-regional planning and scenario building will be examined in the context of conservation planning at The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

This project will contribute to both science and society in many ways. It will demonstrate the importance of social science information and approaches in ecosystem investigations, expanding the results of the LTER network and breaching the divide between social and natural science. The data protocols developed will also benefit other communities of social and natural scientists through the involvement of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a major national repository of social science data. This project will help to develop general theories on how socio-ecological legacies, as well as lags in the recognition of and response to change, vary across space and time. Through detailed case histories and quantitative analyses, the project expects to provide convincing evidence that humans act not only to disturb ecosystems but also monitor ecosystem values and respond to maintain stability and minimize crises. Project results will provide information of direct use to policy makers, TNC, and land managers by using an approach that explicitly relates socio-ecological processes to varying levels of political organization. The cross-scale data collection and analyses are expected to demonstrate that some patterns of human-ecological interactions are surprisingly long term, vary across space and time, and are non-linear. The project's most significant long-term contribution may prove to be through education; as this project will train new interdisciplinary scientists at all levels of the educational spectrum, inform public officials, and contribute to more effective land-management practices. This project is an award resulting from the FY 2002 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.

The 1-year UMEB renewal will support four current students for their second year of research. The students are currently engaged in active research programs in laboratories with an emphasis on environmental biology, including molecular systematics of endangered species, community ecology, environmental physiology, and insect behavior. We will continue active monitoring of their progress and mentoring experiences. In addition to their research activities, the students will participate in a seminar series that will expose them to career opportunities and ethical issues in environmental science, and will participate in short field trips. During their final semester, they will complete their projects, analyse data, and write up their results for publication and presentation at a scientific meeting. Assessment tools will be used to determine the extent of their understanding of the scientific method, critical thinking, and development of self confidence. The students will then have the opportunity to move on to other research opportunities within the University.

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.

This integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in urban ecology at Arizona State University. The primary study site is Phoenix and central Arizona but both historic (through archeology) and comparative approaches are employed. Intellectual merit. The purpose of the program is to provide doctoral students with enhanced cross disciplinary collaborative training in the natural and social sciences relevant to urban ecology, broadly construed. Training will involve team research through student-originated workshops, interdisciplinary "issues" seminars, dissertation research in urban ecology with an explicitly collaborative component, and an international experience. Broader impacts of the project include close attention to the conduct of research and the engagement of science with law, policy, and the public sphere. Unlike most doctoral programs in the United States that are based on independence, this program will use and investigate the efficacy of interdependence (collaboration, cooperation) as a research mode. The premise is that scientific investigation in important arenas such as cities is increasingly multidisciplinary, yet students commonly receive little direct training or experience in collaborative research strategies and group dynamics necessary for effective communication among disciplines. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Distributional and ideological barriers can create disparities in the ability of the public to advocate for their interests in particular environmental decisions. This research focuses on the roles interactions between organizations play in shaping public understanding of water resource issues, with a particular emphasis on water education provided to citizens of metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. The objectives of this study are to use an environmental justice framework to understand: (1) the geographic distribution of water education effort in metropolitan Phoenix; (2) how public receptiveness and knowledge differ across areas of high and low water education effort; (3) the distribution and qualities of water education gaps (Are they merely spatial or are there mismatches between water education effort and public receptiveness? How systemic are these gaps?); (4) the roles of organizational networks in public perceptions of each organization's usefulness; and (5) potential ways to take advantage of ties or making changes to the network structure of organizations that could influence the equity and efficiency of the educational landscape. To address these objectives, this research will use participatory geographic information systems (GIS) methods, which use local expertise to create and evaluate maps, to delineate the spatial overlap of programs provided by all 43 organizations providing information about water conservation and water quality. Maps designate census tracts as receiving "high" or "low" amounts of information. This research also uses social network analysis to analyze the structure of informational ties between organizations to determine how much they might influence each other. Finally, a multi-modal survey of residents in three "high" educator effort and three "low" educator effort neighborhoods will measure water knowledge, information perceptions, information preferences, and demographic characteristics. The findings will demonstrate ways in which relationships between organizations influence public awareness about water. The investigators expect that there are spatial differences in issue awareness, but that ideological differences between water education providers and sub-populations may categorically exclude subgroups traditionally vulnerable to environmental ills. Researchers predict that social networks between organizations may illuminate why educators may conform on sub-optimal campaigns designed to inform the public about local water issues.

The proposed research is a consideration of spatial and ideological elements of public information as an environmental justice issue. However, GIS-based environmental justice studies rarely address the concept of recognition justice which suggests that people must have a voice in the development of policy. By examining patterns in the level of accessible information about water conservation, this study is able to address the issue of recognition justice. Methodologically, this research presents a new combination of decision making tools. For example, combining participatory GIS with visualizations and statistical analyses of the relationships between organizations enhances the salience of the information for water educators and represents new interdisciplinary research methods that can be useful in the future. This type of social network analysis is rarely used in environmental justice and provides context for the choices made by education organizations and insight into how particular messages or methods of information sharing become popular. This research also has potential use within the water management field. Upon completion, the investigators will host a meeting for water educators and water managers to report the results of the study and provide a forum for discussion about potential ways to shift resources to better serve the water literacy needs and environmental goals of the metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona population.

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.

An important focus of scientific research is understanding the complex interactions between human societies and the climatic, physical, and biological environments on which they depend, and which they, in turn, influence. Past environments, of course, were often quite different from those we experience today. Furthermore, important processes of social and environmental change operate slowly and are sometimes visible only when viewed over decades or centuries. In order to study social and natural processes operating over anything other than short periods in recent decades, long-term environmental knowledge specific to particular locations and times is essential.

Unfortunately, state-of-the-art data on past environments are difficult to find and even more difficult to integrate and interpret. Under the direction of Dr. Kintigh and his colleagues, the project will develop plans for an online tool, SKOPE (Synthesized Knowledge of Past Environments), that will provide state-of-the-art information about the environment experienced by humans at a given a place and time, past or present. Using explicit scientific procedures, it will process the data to yield a cutting-edge synthesis of environmental information specifically tailored to the user's request. Initial development is planned for the Southwest US, but SKOPE's design will be designed to be easily extended to other places and times. Once implemented, SKOPE will be freely accessible on the Internet. It will be applicable in such fields as sustainability, archaeology, sociology, economics, anthropology, and ecology as well as for resource management and planning. For example, it will directly benefit archaeologists comparing the social consequences of long-term climate change across different civilizations and ecologists investigating long-term changes in biodiversity. Planners could use its long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in existing infrastructure that are outside the experience provided by the historic record. Students and members of the general public could learn how ancient environments differed from contemporary ones in places they study, inhabit, or visit.

SKOPE will access online databases of modern and historic observational data (for example, on rainfall, temperature, and plant and animal distributions) as well as databases of indicators for past environments (for example, rainfall reconstructed from tree-ring widths, and plant remains and animal bones found in dated archaeological sites). Scientific experts in the interpretation of different classes of data will develop procedures that transform these diverse environmental observations and indicators into a thoroughly documented scientific synthesis of the environment for the time and place of interest. The design of SKOPE will be guided by the needs stated by potential users in meetings with academic, public-, and private-sector professionals. The project will identify key sources of data on current and past environments and will generalize the analytical procedures required to achieve useful synthesis. Subsequent development could extend the tool to additional areas and times and incorporate more classes of environmental data.

This project will develop SKOPE (Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments), a freely available Web site that will provide easy access to state-of-the-art measurements and reconstructions of long-term environmental data, such as rainfall, temperature, plant and animal distributions, streamflow, and soils. Given a time period and a location, it will display the data graphically and will permit users to download the original high-resolution environmental data. By enabling scholars to easily discover, explore, visualize, and synthesize knowledge of environmental stability and change over centuries or millennia, SKOPE will empower reproducible research on the effects of climatic variation on human societies and the substantial impacts of humans on ancient and modern environments. It will also facilitate ongoing improvement of paleoenvironmental reconstructions. SKOPE will transform vast amounts of prior data collection, modeling, and research into usable environmental knowledge, enhancing the infrastructure of scientific research in such diverse disciplines as agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, ecology, economics, geography, political science, sociology, and sustainability. SKOPE will also make available publicly funded paleoenvironmental data and models to users in industry and government. For example, planners will be able to use SKOPE?s long-term environmental reconstructions to investigate vulnerabilities in infrastructure not revealed by historical experience (for example, streamflow or rainfall regimes outside the ranges of those documented historically). Students will have free access to high-quality environmental scenarios in which to situate their studies. Members of the general public will be able to see how ancient environments differed from those of today. Expanding the community able to obtain and use paleoenvironmental information will increase public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology.

Recent research has demonstrated that investigations of contemporary societal problems can benefit from the use of long-term environmental data and from comparisons with cases in which the interactions of human societies with their environments is well-documented over centuries. By providing easy access to time- and place-specific long-term environmental data, this project seeks to facilitate those efforts. SKOPE addresses two critical challenges to contemporary science: increasing access to publicly funded research; and ensuring that scientific results are transparent and reproducible. SKOPE will enable users to easily discover, download, visualize, and explore many sources of paleoenvironmental data that resulted from publicly funded research that are now difficult (at best) to find and use. SKOPE will also provide robust support for reproducible scientific research. Datasets provided by SKOPE will be accompanied by a systematic, comprehensible record of their origin and computational derivation, giving researchers an unprecedented ability to understand how the data were obtained.