SEES Fellow: Linking Rural Smallholder Soil and Water Management Practices in Tropical Deltas to Sea Level Rise Vulnerability

该项目得到了NSF科学，工程和教育可持续发展研究员（SEES研究员）计划的支持，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的行动提供信息，同时创造必要的劳动力来应对这些挑战。可持续发展科学是一个新兴的领域，它解决了在不损害环境的情况下满足人类需求的挑战，并且不牺牲后代满足其需求的能力。一个强大的科学队伍需要在跨学科研究和思维方面受过教育和培训的个人，特别是在可持续发展科学领域。在SEES奖学金的支持下，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确立自己的地位。这一跨学科（地球科学和社会科学）项目将探讨热带三角洲小农户水土管理做法与海平面上升脆弱性之间的联系。 热带三角洲肥沃的土壤、充满活力的生态系统和丰富的水道吸引了人类，并支持了数千年的社会、文化和经济发展。不幸的是，他们的高人口和耕地，平坦的景观也使热带三角洲容易受到海平面上升预测在本世纪。为了解决小农农业做法与热带三角洲沿海洪灾区域规模脆弱性之间的社会-生物物理反馈耦合问题，本研究将利用两个互补的概念框架来确定农村水土管理做法与侵蚀和潮汐洪水增加之间的联系，以开发地理空间分析和开源耦合模型。 该研究的重点是孟加拉国的恒河-雅鲁藏布江三角洲，那里的社会和环境问题交汇在一起，从而为了解生物物理和社会经济的耦合过程提供了一个动态、复杂和具有全球意义的案例研究。该研究将通过应用制度发展和分析框架以及社会生态系统框架来促进对这些耦合过程如何支持人类-自然三角洲系统可持续性的理解。分析和结果将以公开来源的形式产生和储存，以便向决策者、环境管理人员、发展组织和外国农业推广机构广泛传播结果。 SEES研究员Kimberly Rogers博士将与科罗拉多大学的主持导师James Syvitski博士和印第安纳州大学布卢明顿的合作伙伴导师Eduardo Brondizio博士合作。

The 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. Sustainability science is an emerging field that addresses the challenges of meeting human needs without harm to the environment, and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. A strong scientific workforce requires individuals educated and trained in interdisciplinary research and thinking, especially in the area of sustainability science. With SEES Fellowship support, this project will enable a promising early career researcher to establish herself in an independent research career related to sustainability. This interdisciplinary (geosciences and social sciences) project will explore linkages between smallholder soil and water management practices in tropical deltas to sea level rise vulnerability. The fertile soils, vibrant ecosystems and abundant waterways of tropical deltas have attracted humans and supported social, cultural and economic development for millennia. Unfortunately, their high populations and cultivated, flat landscapes also make tropical deltas vulnerable to sea level rise predicted in this century. To address coupled socio-biophysical feedbacks between smallholder farm practices and regional scale vulnerability to coastal flooding in tropical deltas, this study will utilize two complementary conceptual frameworks to identify links between rural soil and water management practices and erosion and increased tidal flooding for development of a geospatial analysis and open-source coupled model. The study focuses on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta in Bangladesh, where social and environmental concerns converge, thus providing a dynamic, complex and globally significant case study for understanding coupled biophysical and socioeconomic processes. The research will advance understanding of how these coupled processes underlie the sustainability of human-natural delta systems by applying an Institutional Development and Analysis Framework, and a SocioEcological Systems Framework. The analyses and results will be produced and stored in open-source formats that will provide for broad dissemination of the results to policy makers, environmental managers, development organizations, and foreign agricultural extensions. The SEES Fellow, Dr. Kimberly Rogers, will work with host mentor Dr. James Syvitski at the University of Colorado, and with partner mentor Dr. Eduardo Brondizio at Indiana University Bloomington.