SEES Fellows: Hoahu, to set aside for the future - understanding sustainability of community based natural resource management through a century of rapid land use change

这个项目寻求扩大对社会生态系统如何适应变化的理解。这位研究员将在一个模范岛屿系统夏威夷Ahupuaa(夏威夷传统的土地分割单位，沿着分水岭边界组织人类社区)中研究基于社区的自然资源管理，从社区土地所有权到种植园农业，再到在农地上开发豪华住宅。这项研究将考虑改变获取机制、资源和社区的边界、使用者的权利和责任、资源健康和生态知识。研究人员希望阐明往往看不见的自然资源利用模式--资源是如何出于文化目的获得的，如何共享，以及它们不仅为个人，而且为整个社区提供了什么文化生态系统服务。这项研究将使用地理分析来绘制传统知识和资源使用以及政策和土地利用变化的文化景观图，使用视觉和叙事工具一起展示不同的信息来源。这项研究将通过以下方式加强未来以社区为基础的资源管理工作：1)记录迅速消失的传统生态知识，2)创建可视化工具来显示过去的环境变化，同时提供衡量未来变化的基线数据，3)教育未来的领导人如何在地方一级保护自然资源，以及4)以该地区的诗意和讲故事的传统为基础，向非学术受众翻译观看同一景观的多种不同方式，以及往往相互矛盾的可持续发展观点。该项目采用混合方法，包括访谈、重点小组和绘图，在自然资源管理、文化和自然地理、文化人类学、规划、环境教育和环境研究等领域架起了桥梁。这项研究提供了改变管理自然资源的概念框架并在这一领域内实施政策的潜力。该项目得到了NSF科学、工程和教育可持续发展研究员(SEE FLOLS)计划的支持，目的是帮助实现必要的发现，从而为导致环境、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SEES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发展相关的独立研究生涯中站稳脚跟。

This project seeks to expand understanding of how social-ecological systems adapt to change. The research fellow will investigate community-based natural resource management in a model island system, the Hawaiian ahupuaa (a traditional Hawaiian unit of land division which organized human communities along watershed boundaries) over a time of transition from communal land ownership, to plantation agriculture, to development of luxury homes on agricultural lands. The study will consider changing mechanisms of access, boundaries of both resources and the community, rights and responsibilities of users, resource health, and ecological knowledge. The researcher hopes to illuminate often unseen patterns of natural resource use - how resources are accessed for cultural purposes, how they are shared, and what cultural ecosystem services they provide, not just to individuals, but to entire communities. The study will use geographic analysis to map the cultural landscape of traditional knowledge and resource use alongside policy and land use change, using visual and narrative tools to display diverse sources of information together. This research will enhance future community-based resource management efforts by: 1) documenting fast disappearing traditional ecological knowledge, 2) creating visual tools to display past environmental changes, while providing baseline data against which to measure future changes, 3) educating future leaders on how to care for natural resources at the local level, and 4) building on the area's poetic and storytelling traditions to translate multiple diverse ways of seeing the same landscape, and often conflicting views of sustainability, to non-academic audiences. In utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates interviews, focus groups and mapping the project bridges the fields of natural resource management, cultural and physical geography, cultural anthropology, planning, environmental education and environmental studies. The research offers the potential to transform the conceptual framework within which natural resources are managed and to effect policy within this realm.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.