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

该项目旨在扩大对社会生态系统如何适应变化的理解。 该研究员将调查在一个示范岛屿系统中以社区为基础的自然资源管理，夏威夷ahupuaa（夏威夷传统的土地划分单位，沿着流域边界组织人类社区）从公共土地所有权过渡到种植园农业，再到在农业用地上开发豪华住宅。 这项研究将考虑不断变化的获取机制、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。 研究人员希望阐明经常看不见的自然资源使用模式-资源如何用于文化目的，如何共享，以及它们提供的文化生态系统服务，不仅仅是个人，而是整个社区。 这项研究将利用地理分析绘制传统知识和资源利用的文化景观，以及政策和土地利用的变化，利用视觉和叙事工具来展示不同的信息来源。 这项研究将通过以下方式加强今后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）创造视觉工具来显示过去的环境变化，同时提供基线数据，以衡量未来的变化，（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）建立在该地区的诗意和讲故事的传统，将看待同一景观的多种不同方式以及经常相互冲突的可持续性观点翻译给非学术观众。 该项目采用访谈、重点小组和绘图等混合方法，将自然资源管理、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联系起来。该研究有可能改变自然资源管理的概念框架，并影响该领域的政策。该项目得到美国国家科学基金会可持续发展科学、工程和教育研究员的支持（SEES研究员）计划，其目标是帮助实现所需的发现，为导致环境，能源和社会可持续性，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，该项目将使一个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建立自己的地位。

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.