Doctoral Dissertation Research: Understanding the Acequia Irrigation Communities of New Mexico as Complex Social-Ecological Systems

社会生态系统发生在人类与环境相互作用以维持其福祉的任何地方。例子包括渔民、森林使用者和灌溉者社区，其中许多社区以相对分散的方式运作了几个世纪。在这些系统中，用户群体可能面临各种干扰或中断，如干旱、国家政策干预或经济发展和城市化。专注于这些问题的学者尚未充分解释过去成功应对古老干扰的这种分散系统如何无法跟上生物物理和政治或经济制度变化所带来的新干扰的发生。这个博士论文研究项目将有助于填补这些空白，通过分析一套以社区为基础的灌溉系统在北方新墨西哥州被称为“acequias”。 它将整合几种科学方法，包括机构，社会网络，历史和计量经济学回归分析，以及地理信息系统和遥感技术，以了解陶斯山谷地区的acequias在历史上如何应对洪水和干旱，以及最近的国家干预和经济发展。该研究将涉及通过采访山谷中的灌溉者收集数据，有关历史用水和重要立法的档案数据，该地区国家生产的水文调查，以及Landsat卫星图像，以衡量系统随时间推移维持农业生产的能力。这些数据将用于创建用于管理水资源的社会网络数据库，以及重要的机构、人口和生物物理信息数据库。这些数据库将用于帮助了解系统与社会和生态干扰相互作用时产生的结果，鉴于世界上许多自然资源是由当地用户群体管理的，因此必须了解这些资源如何以及是否对不同类型的干扰具有复原力或易受影响。这项研究将有助于回答理论问题以及应用政策问题。它将探索用户组如何能够自下而上管理地理上广泛的资源，而无需集中控制。它将有助于了解社会生态系统的哪些特性会增加或阻碍其应对洪水和干旱等干扰的能力。此外，它将进一步了解多种形式的政府之间的纵向联系，以及这些对自然资源管理的影响。最后，它将探讨城市化和经济发展对这些传统社区系统的影响。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个独立的研究生涯。

Social-ecological systems occur wherever humans interact with their environment to sustain their well-being. Examples include communities of fishermen, forest users, and irrigators, many of which have functioned for centuries in a relatively decentralized manner. In each of these systems, groups of users may face a variety of disturbances or disruptions, such as droughts, state policy intervention, or economic development and urbanization. Scholars focusing on these issues have not fully explained how such decentralized systems that in the past responded successfully to age-old disturbances, have not kept pace with the occurrence of novel disturbances brought on by changing biophysical and political or economic regimes. This doctoral dissertation research project will help to fill these gaps by analyzing a set of community-based irrigation systems in northern New Mexico known as "acequias". It will integrate several scientific approaches, including institutional, social network, historical, and econometric regression analyses, as well as geographic information systems and remote sensing technologies, in order to understand how the acequias in an area known as the Taos valley have historically responded to floods and droughts, and more recently to state intervention and economic development. The research will involve collecting data through interviews with irrigators in the valley, archival data regarding historic water use and important legislation, state-produced hydrographic surveys of the area, and Landsat satellite imagery to measure the systems' abilities to maintain agricultural production over time. These data will be used in the creation of databases of the social network used to manage water, and of important institutional, demographic, and biophysical information. These databases will be used to help understand the outcomes produced when the systems interact with social and ecological disturbances.Given that many of the world's natural resources are managed by local user groups, it is important to understand how and whether they are resilient or vulnerable to different types of disturbances. This research will help to answer theoretical questions as well as applied policy questions. It will explore how user groups are able to manage geographically extensive resources from the bottom up, without centralized control. It will help understand what properties of social-ecological systems increase, or hamper, their ability to respond to disturbances such as floods and droughts. Additionally, it will further understanding of vertical linkages between multiple forms of government, and the effects these have on natural resource management. Finally, it will explore the effects that urbanization and economic development have had on these traditional community-based systems. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.