SEES Fellows: Social-Ecological Resilience of Coastal Shoreline Ecosystems: Developing a Framework for Informed Decision-Making

这个跨学科项目将调查有助于沿海恢复力的社会、生态和工程因素，并制定一个改善沟通和知情决策的框架。该研究旨在了解沿海岸线的社会、生态和工程目标是如何与渔业和鱼类栖息地的健康相互联系的，以便制定一个框架来提高社会和生态弹性。研究地点包括纳拉甘西特湾和莫比尔湾，这两个都是人口稠密的大型河口河口，近岸海洋栖息地急剧减少。研究工作将包括：1)确定生境组成变化对渔业的影响并建立模型；2)研究影响岸线生态系统可持续性的社会、文化和政治因素；3)评估防波堤岸线保护能力和生境复杂性；4)将前三项任务产生的社会、生态和工程指标纳入决策框架。该项目将涉及学术界、政府和私营部门的研究人员和实践者之间的合作，并包括各种面向学生和公众的外展活动。对于那些负责管理不断变化的地球上的资源的人来说，了解与人类和自然社区的复原力有关的因素的复杂性是重中之重。在过去，大多数海岸保护规划和优先排序都是在没有足够的知识或考虑社会文化或工程影响的情况下进行的。本研究的目的是为管理者提供决策支持工具，使恢复和可持续发展的努力，最大限度地提高社会资本。该项目由美国国家科学基金会科学、工程和教育可持续发展研究员（SEES研究员）计划支持，其目标是帮助实现必要的发现，为导致环境、能源和社会可持续发展的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。在see研究员的支持下，该项目将使有前途的早期职业研究人员能够在与可持续性相关的独立研究生涯中建立自己的职业生涯。

This interdisciplinary project will investigate the social, ecological and engineering factors that contribute to coastal resilience and develop a framework for improved communication and informed decision making. The study aims to understand how social, ecological and engineering objectives for coastal shorelines are interlinked with the health of fisheries and fish habitats in order to develop a framework to improve social and ecological resilience. Study sites include Narragansett and Mobile Bays, which are both large, densely-populated estuarine embayments that have experienced dramatic declines in nearshore marine habitats. The research effort will 1) identify and model the fisheries consequences of shifts in habitat composition; 2) investigate the social, cultural and political factors that affect the sustainability of shoreline ecosystems, 3) assess the shoreline protection capacity and habitat complexity of wave-attenuating breakwaters; and 4) incorporate the social, ecological and engineering indices generated by the first three tasks into a decision-making framework. The project will involve collaboration between researchers and practitioners in the academic, government and private sectors, and include a variety of outreach activities to students and the public.Understanding the complexity of factors related to resilience of human and natural communities is of high priority for those tasked with managing resources on a changing planet. In the past, most coastal conservation planning and prioritization has occurred without adequate knowledge or consideration of socio-cultural or engineering impacts. The goal of this research is to provide managers with decision support tools to enable restoration and sustainability efforts that maximize social capital. This project is supported under the NSF Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability Fellows (SEES Fellows) program, with the goal of helping to enable discoveries needed to inform actions that lead to environmental, energy and societal sustainability while creating the necessary workforce to address these challenges. With SEES Fellows support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish themselves in an independent research career related to sustainability.