BE/CNH: Systems Approach to Maintaining Natural Capital in Rapidly Developing Watersheds

随着经济和人口的增长，世界各地的土地使用继续发生变化。土地使用的变化往往对自然资本和这种资本提供的生态系统服务产生巨大的不利影响。该项目的长期目标是：（1）更好地了解和预测土地利用变化及其对流域生物复杂性的影响;（2）提高决策者利用这一信息促进经济福祉和保护自然资本的能力。 在这项孵化活动中，研究人员将在流域尺度上对响应阈值和偶发事件的综合生物物理/经济系统模型进行研究。 这是一个显着的偏离所采取的方法，许多以前的工作，其中信息已被分析使用回归关系的基础上连续的功能，不能处理阈值和情节事件。调查人员计划举办三次讲习班，以发展团队、评估知识状况以及阐明概念框架和方法，以便进行更大规模和更深入的研究。

Land-use continues to change throughout the world as economies and populations grow. Land-use change often has large adverse impacts on natural capital and the ecosystem services that this capital provides. The long-term goals of this project are 1) to improve understanding and prediction of land-use change and its effects on biocomplexity in watersheds, and 2) to improve the capacity of decision makers to use this information in their efforts to foster both economic well being and preservation of natural capital. In this incubation activity, the investigators will work at the watershed scale toward integrated biophysical/economic systems models that respond to thresholds and episodic events. This is a significant departure from the approach taken by much preceding work, in which information has been analyzed using regression relationships based on continuous functions that cannot handle threshold and episodic events. The investigators plan to hold three workshops for team development, assessment of the state of knowledge, and the articulation of the conceptual framework and methods for a larger and more in-depth study.