Modeling harvesting behavior to understand adaptation, mitigation, and transformation in northern subsistence systems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).People across the globe are increasingly facing rapid changes in the resources on which they depend for food and survival. In the Arctic, climate warming is one of several interrelated forces of change that could threaten the livelihoods of indigenous communities. While indigenous peoples of the north have a long history of adaptation to environmental change, the limits to their adaptive capacity may be challenged because of these emergent conditions. This project will utilize agent-based modeling (ABM)to elucidate the decision making process that rural subsistence based communities undergo in a changing environment. Through ABM the research team will investigate the linkages between cultural adaptations and the subsistence resources harvested by indigenous communities that have developed a mixed, subsistence-cash, economy. The PIs partner with two local communities of the North Slope and Interior Alaska to document how current environmental changes are affecting subsistence harvesting. Local knowledge and quantitative analysis are coupled together as the basis for modeling subsistence harvesters' decisions in order to understand adaptation in conditions of ecological, economic, and social change. In addition, the researchers hope to identify the potential tradeoffs that emerge with changing social-ecological conditions. A spatially explicit ABM that focuses on the multi-species seasonal round will be developed and used to explore the implications of three interacting drivers of change - climate change, changing fuel costs, and changes in land-use, which are likely to affect harvesters? choices and adaptive strategies. This research seeks to operational concepts espoused as part of resilience theory, and provide a means for modeling these systems and improving our understanding of the dynamics of social-ecological systems.