CNH-L: Complex Dynamics of Telecoupled Human and Natural Systems

农业商品贸易的全球化日益将世界各地的消费者和生产者联系在一起。越来越多的森林转化和其他土地用于农业生产，与为全球市场生产的商品有关。历史上由当地农业满足的大部分粮食需求正越来越多地由全球贸易来满足;在过去三十年中，粮食出口增加了10倍。该项目将通过研究中国和巴西的农业市场和土地利用如何通过商品贸易联系起来，对这种连接自然和人类系统的全球规模联系进行量化和建模。自然环境以两种方式纳入这一模式：第一，当地土地使用选择影响土壤质量和水，这反过来又影响随后的农业选择;第二，农业向热带森林的扩展对全球气候和生物多样性产生影响。该项目产生的模型将增加我们对人类和自然系统如何协调变化的理解，即使连接距离很远（远距离耦合）。该项目是第一次努力量化远距离耦合的农业和经济系统的复杂动态，超越了传统的关注单一系统，单向影响或系统的比较分析。它代表了耦合系统研究的一个令人兴奋的新前沿，对远耦合系统的理论，方法和应用做出了重大贡献。这项工作在为符合国家利益的国际商品贸易提供更广泛的观点和新的视角方面以及在培训下一代科学家方面都具有进一步的重要性。远距离耦合和本地耦合如何在它们对人类-自然动态的影响方面相互增强或抵消？ 为了解决这些问题和相关假设，该项目将侧重于涉及农产品贸易的主要电信联接（例如，巴西和中国这两个世界上最重要的新兴经济体之间的贸易（包括用于食品和动物饲料的大豆）。这两个国家是远距离耦合系统的一个很好的例子，但人们对它们迅速增长的贸易对人与自然动态的影响知之甚少。通过利用现有的遥感和社会经济数据，并收集补充性的新数据，研究人员将模拟复杂的动态和远耦合系统的关键组成部分之间的关系。将采用广泛使用的全球贸易分析项目模式进行国际和国家一级的分析。它们将通过生态实地考察和社会经济调查，以及通过开发和验证基于远程耦合的代理模型，在区域和地方规模进行深入研究。这些研究涵盖地方到国际范围，将通过系统集成进行连接。

The globalization of trade in agricultural commodities is increasingly connecting consumers and producers around the world. A growing fraction of forest conversion and other land placed into agricultural production is associated with commodities produced for global markets. Much of the demand for food that was historically met by local agriculture is increasingly being met by global trade; in the past three decades food exports have increased 10-fold. This project will quantify and model this type of global scale connection that links natural and human systems by studying how agricultural markets and land use in China and Brazil are linked via commodity trade. The natural environment is incorporated in this model in two ways: first, the local land use choices affect soil quality and water, which in turn affects subsequent agricultural choices; second, the expansion of agriculture into tropical forest has an effect on global climate and biodiversity. The models produced by this project will increase our understanding of how human and natural systems change in concert even when the connections are over great distances (telecoupled). This project is a first effort to quantify complex dynamics of distantly coupled agricultural and economic systems by going beyond the traditional focus on a single system, one-way impacts, or comparative analysis of systems. It represents an exciting new frontier of research in coupled systems, with substantial contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of telecoupled systems. The work is of further importance in providing a broader view and new perspective on international commodity trade, which is in the national interest, and in training the next generation of scientistsThe goal of this proposal is to quantify the telecoupling framework to address fundamental questions about human and natural systems such as: What are the effects of telecouplings on human-nature dynamics across scales in distant systems? How do telecouplings and local couplings enhance or offset each other in terms of their effects on human-nature dynamics? To address these questions and associated hypotheses, the project will focus on major telecouplings involving the trade of agricultural products (e.g., soybeans for food and animal feed) between Brazil and China, two of the world's most important emerging economies. These two countries constitute an excellent example of telecoupled systems, but little is known about the effects of their rapidly increasing trade on human-nature dynamics. By leveraging existing remote sensing and socioeconomic data and collecting complementary new data, researchers will model complex dynamics and relationships among key components of telecoupled systems. Analyses at the international and national scales will be conducted with the widely used Global Trade Analysis Project model. They will be complemented by in-depth studies at the regional and local scales through ecological fieldwork and socioeconomic surveys, as well as through developing and validating a telecoupled agent-based model. These studies, spanning local to international scales, will be joined via systems integration.