CNH: The Complexities of Ecological and Social Diversity: A Long-Term Perspective

CNH：生态和社会多样性的复杂性：长期视角

• 批准号: 1113991
• 负责人: Margaret Nelson
• 金额: $ 142.5万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-01 至 2016-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1113991&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CNH; Complexities; Ecological; Social; Diversity

Calls for preserving cultural and biological diversity regularly appear in the news. The preservation of diversity is not just a subject of study by ecologists, anthropologists, conservationists, and land managers; it is an explicit goal of social movements and governmental policies. This research project will examine how social and ecological diversity interact to influence the resilience of societies facing major changes in their social or environmental circumstances. The goal of the investigators conducting this project is to discover configurations of diversity in ecological landscapes and in forms of social organization that make systems more or less able to cope with significant environmental or social changes without undergoing an unpleasant transformation. The researchers will focus on a few important variables indicating both social diversity (integration, conformity, and hierarchy) and ecological diversity (diversity of plant and animal species and of patches on the landscape). To understand the relationships of interest, they will develop mathematical models of the interactions of key variables and conduct extensive quantitative analysis of data from empirical studies of millennium-long societal trajectories. They will examine five archaeological cases from the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico as long-term "experiments" to see how diversity in the social and ecological realms affected these societies' abilities to thrive or forced them into dramatic transformations when faced with different environmental or social stimuli. The outcomes of these analyses will provide the basis for dynamic modeling designed to investigate the broad range of conditions in which these domains of diversity contribute to varying responses to change across different time scales. Model analyses conducted using dynamical systems and numerical techniques will begin with simple social situations coupled with simple landscapes followed by step-wise modifications designed to "complexify" both social and ecological modeled landscapes. The project will move iteratively between archaeological analysis and mathematical modeling. Patterns observed in the empirical studies will inform the modeling, which will examine those relationships more abstractly. The effects predicted by the modeling then will be explored with respect to the empirical details of the case studies. Insights about diversity in contemporary research on interacting social and ecological systems have overwhelmingly relied upon studies and observations over short time spans. This project's emphasis on case-specific, comparative analysis of long-term, regional-scale archaeological sequences in the Americas will yield new perspectives regarding important episodes in human history. This project will demonstrate the value of integrating insights from ecology and archaeology, the importance of balancing concerns for social and ecological processes, and the ability of archaeology to contribute to understanding the role of diversity in the resilience of social-ecological systems. As societies cope with inevitable change, their actions generate vulnerabilities. Lack of awareness of these dynamics can contribute to the need for costly transformations. When made more aware of the complex dynamics of change as they have functioned in the past, people can better weigh the implications of their decisions and build resilience to such vulnerabilities. This project will demonstrate how interactions associated with social and ecological diversity can inform contemporary policies dealing with sustainability, robustness, vulnerability, and transformative change. This project also will enhance education from pre-collegiate through graduate levels as students and teachers integrate knowledge derived from both the social and natural sciences and benefit from primary datasets of richly documented social and ecological analyses of diversity. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.

呼吁保护文化和生物多样性的呼声经常出现在新闻中。保护多样性不仅仅是生态学家、人类学家、自然资源保护主义者和土地管理者的研究课题；这是社会运动和政府政策的明确目标。该研究项目将研究社会和生态多样性如何相互作用，以影响面临社会或环境重大变化的社会的复原力。开展该项目的研究人员的目标是发现生态景观和社会组织形式的多样性配置，使系统或多或少能够应对重大的环境或社会变化，而不会经历令人不快的转变。研究人员将重点关注社会多样性（整合、一致性和等级）和生态多样性（动植物物种和景观斑块的多样性）的几个重要变量。为了理解利益关系，他们将开发关键变量相互作用的数学模型，并对千年社会轨迹的实证研究数据进行广泛的定量分析。他们将研究美国西南部和墨西哥北部的五个考古案例，作为长期的“实验”，看看社会和生态领域的多样性是如何影响这些社会繁荣的能力的，或者在面对不同的环境或社会刺激时迫使它们发生戏剧性的转变。这些分析的结果将为动态建模提供基础，旨在研究这些多样性领域在不同时间尺度上对变化的不同响应所产生的广泛条件。使用动力系统和数值技术进行的模型分析将从简单的社会情景和简单的景观开始，然后进行逐步的修改，旨在使社会和生态模型景观“复杂化”。该项目将在考古分析和数学建模之间进行迭代。在实证研究中观察到的模式将为建模提供信息，建模将更抽象地检查这些关系。然后将根据案例研究的经验细节来探讨模型预测的影响。当代社会和生态系统相互作用研究中对多样性的认识主要依赖于短时间跨度的研究和观察。该项目的重点是对美洲地区长期、区域尺度的考古序列进行具体案例的比较分析，这将为人类历史上的重要事件提供新的视角。该项目将展示整合生态学和考古学见解的价值，平衡对社会和生态过程的关注的重要性，以及考古学有助于理解多样性在社会生态系统弹性中的作用的能力。在社会应对不可避免的变化时，它们的行动产生了脆弱性。缺乏对这些动态的认识可能导致需要进行代价高昂的转换。当人们更多地意识到变化的复杂动态，就像他们过去所起的作用一样，人们可以更好地权衡他们的决定的影响，并建立对这些脆弱性的恢复能力。该项目将展示与社会和生态多样性相关的相互作用如何为处理可持续性、稳健性、脆弱性和转型变化的当代政策提供信息。该项目还将加强从大学预科到研究生阶段的教育，因为学生和教师将社会科学和自然科学的知识结合起来，并从丰富记录的多样性社会和生态分析的主要数据集中受益。本项目由美国国家科学基金会自然与人类系统耦合动力学（CNH）项目资助。