BE/CNH: Feedbacks Among Forestry, Agriculture, and Fire in Amazonia

随着亚马逊盆地的农村经济与世界市场捆绑在一起，伐木和砍伐森林的新脉冲将随之而来。这一趋势的潜在后果包括依赖森林的降雨量减少、稀树草原状灌丛植被的蔓延、生物多样性的大幅丧失以及温室气体排放的增加。加大对新公路走廊治理的投资和加强以森林为基础的经济，可能有利于走一条更公平、更可持续的发展道路，维护森林生态系统。然而，人们对能够促进这一替代途径的政策干预知之甚少，部分原因是亚马逊地区生态、经济和气候系统在多个尺度的时空尺度上运行的复杂相互作用。该跨学科研究项目将为一条主要的新公路走廊和整个流域开发亚马逊土地利用变化、火灾、植被动态和碳通量的定量、空间显式模型。生态系统模型将火灾风险描述为干旱、土地利用和干扰历史的函数，并将通过土地利用对火灾制度的影响和通过火灾风险对土地使用者行为的影响与经济模型相结合。生态系统模型将跟踪植被结构和恢复以及相关的碳库，以估计与土地使用情景相关的碳通量和易燃性。这些经济模型将首先根据使用卫星数据和大型地理信息系统数据库确定的基础设施和生物物理因素，计算竞争农林用地的每个像素的潜在盈利能力。实际占用每个像素的土地使用将取决于人口和城市化变量，这些变量是在市级人口普查数据的计量经济学模型中捕获的，以及在元胞自动机模型中表示的空间关联。生态和经济模型将得到亚马逊正在铺设的五条主要公路走廊中的两条沿线已经进行的实地研究的支持。拟议的研究将为热带边境地区开发第一个空间显式模拟模型，将土地使用者的寻租行为与塑造这种行为的生态和气候过程相结合。该模式旨在评估区域经济和生态系统对基础设施投资、监管和财政干预、宏观经济因素和气候变化的反应，因此可能提高区域决策过程的科学质量。这项研究为跨学科教育计划提供了基础，该计划支持至少16名博士生和15名硕士生的培训。将与NSF IGERT计划合作开发跨学科研究生实地课程、三种语言教科书和教育模拟模型。该项目得到了2004财年环境中生物复杂性特别竞赛的一个奖项的支持，该竞赛的重点是自然和人类耦合系统的动态变化。

As the rural economies of the Amazon Basin become tied to world markets, new pulses of logging and deforestation will follow. Potential consequences of this trend include a reduction of forest-dependent rainfall, the spread of savanna-like scrub vegetation, substantial losses of biodiversity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Greater investments in governance of new highway corridors and the strengthening of forest-based economies could favor a more equitable and sustainable developmental pathway that maintains the forest ecosystem. Policy interventions that could foster this alternative pathway are poorly understood, however, in part because of the complex interactions among ecological, economic, and climatic systems operating across multiple scales spatial and temporal scales in the Amazon region. The interdisciplinary research project will develop quantitative, spatially explicit models of Amazon land-use change, fire, vegetation dynamics, and carbon flux for a major new highway corridor and for the entire basin. The ecosystem model will describe fire risk as a function of drought, land use, and disturbance history, and will be coupled to the economic models through land-use effects on the fire regime and through fire-risk effects on the behavior of land users. The ecosystem model will track vegetation structure and recovery with associated carbon pools to estimate the carbon fluxes and flammability associated with land-use scenarios. The economic models will first calculate the potential profitability of each pixel for competing agricultural and forestry land uses as a function of infrastructure and biophysical factors determined using satellite data and a large GIS database. Land uses that actually occupy each pixel will depend on population and urbanization variables that are captured within an econometric model of municipal-level census data and spatial associations that are represented within a cellular automata model. Ecological and economic modeling will be supported by field research already underway along two of the five major highway corridors that are being paved in Amazonia.The proposed research would develop the first spatially explicit simulation model for a tropical frontier region that integrates the rent-seeking behavior of land users with the ecological and climatic processes that shape this behavior. The model will be designed to assess the responses of regional economies and ecosystems to infrastructure investments, regulatory and fiscal interventions, macroeconomic factors, and climatic change, and may therefore increase the scientific quality of the region's policy-making process. This research provides the foundation for a program of interdisciplinary education that supports the training of at least 16 doctoral and 15 masters-level students. Interdisciplinary graduate field courses, a tri-lingual textbook, and an educational simulation model will be developed in collaboration with an NSF IGERT program. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2004 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.