Collaborative Research: Climate, land use, and the rise and fall of powerful Sub-Saharan African societies

合作研究：气候、土地利用以及强大的撒哈拉以南非洲社会的兴衰

• 批准号: 0551668
• 负责人: Valery Terwilliger
• 金额: $ 23.39万
• 依托单位: University of Kansas Center for Research Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2006
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2006-04-01 至 2010-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0551668&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Climate; land; use

Key information for predicting the effects of land uses and climatic change on modern societies can come from reconstructing the environments and trajectories of major cultures of the past. Ethiopia has three properties that make it among the most important locations for understanding the extent to which interactions between environment and land use influence societal developments. First, its societies presently suffer consequences of land use and climate change. Second, its long history of human settlement includes great migrations, an agricultural origin, and the rise and fall of important civilizations; all with incompletely understood links to land use and ecological change. Third, Ethiopia's topography provides gradients of climates in which to develop and calibrate methods of reconstructing paleoenvironments. The researchers will take advantage of the second property to reconstruct the paleoenvironments of the past 7000 years in an area of northern Ethiopia that was a probable center of origin of agriculture and in which several sophisticated societies have risen and fallen. Experiments that take advantage of the third property will also be conducted at research stations along a climate and elevation gradient. A major hypothesis examined for this project is that there are repeatable relationships between climate, land use, and the rise and fall of the societies that have inhabited the highlands of northern Ethiopia. The project also addresses two problems with reconstructing past environments: 1) accuracy of interpretation, and 2) separating effects of climate and land use as a result. Several methods will be used to reconstruct environment; including pedological and stratigraphic analyses, bulk and stable isotopic analyses of several elements in soil organic matter, and modeling of basin hydrology. Environment and land use are not the only factors that influence a society's advances and declines. Nonetheless, evidences are accumulating that decisions about resource use informed by knowledge of environment and land use interactions have permitted some of the oldest societies to persist at high levels of development. The project can directly inform land use management decisions in the drought and famine prone highlands of Ethiopia. The research will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher in both the United States and Ethiopia. It will also promote collaboration between scientists in the two countries. This project is cofunded by the Office of International Science and Engineering.

预测土地利用和气候变化对现代社会影响的关键信息可以来自重建过去主要文化的环境和轨迹。 埃塞俄比亚拥有三个特性，使其成为了解环境与土地利用之间的相互作用影响社会发展程度的最重要地点之一。 首先，其社会目前正遭受土地利用和气候变化的影响。 其次，其悠久的人类聚居历史包括大迁徙、农业起源和重要文明的兴衰；所有这些都与土地利用和生态变化之间的联系尚不完全清楚。 第三，埃塞俄比亚的地形提供了气候梯度，可以在其中开发和校准重建古环境的方法。 研究人员将利用第二个特性重建埃塞俄比亚北部地区过去 7000 年的古环境，该地区可能是农业起源中心，几个复杂社会的兴衰也在这里。 利用第三种特性的实验也将在沿气候和海拔梯度的研究站进行。 该项目检验的一个主要假设是，气候、土地利用以及居住在埃塞俄比亚北部高地的社会的兴衰之间存在着可重复的关系。 该项目还解决了重建过去环境的两个问题：1）解释的准确性，2）因此将气候和土地利用的影响分开。 将使用多种方法来重建环境；包括土壤学和地层分析、土壤有机质中多种元素的本体和稳定同位素分析以及盆地水文建模。 环境和土地利用并不是影响社会进步和衰退的唯一因素。尽管如此，越来越多的证据表明，根据环境和土地利用相互作用的知识做出的资源利用决策使得一些最古老的社会能够持续保持高水平的发展。 该项目可以直接为埃塞俄比亚干旱和饥荒易发高地的土地使用管理决策提供信息。 该研究将为美国和埃塞俄比亚的本科生、研究生以及博士后研究员提供培训机会。 它还将促进两国科学家之间的合作。该项目由国际科学与工程办公室共同资助。