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

农产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。投入农业生产的森林转用和其他土地越来越多地与为全球市场生产的商品有关。过去由当地农业满足的大部分粮食需求正越来越多地得到全球贸易的满足；在过去30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是如何通过大宗商品贸易联系起来的，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。该模型以两种方式纳入自然环境：第一，当地的土地使用选择影响土壤质量和水，进而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。这个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，即使连接是在很远的距离上(远程耦合)。这个项目是通过超越对单一系统、单向影响或系统比较分析的传统关注，首次对遥远耦合的农业和经济系统的复杂动态进行量化。它代表了耦合系统研究的一个令人兴奋的新前沿，对远程耦合系统的理论、方法和应用做出了重大贡献。这项工作对于为符合国家利益的国际初级商品贸易提供更广泛的观点和新的视角，以及在培训下一代科学家方面具有进一步的重要性。这项提议的目标是量化远程耦合框架，以解决关于人类和自然系统的基本问题，例如：远程耦合对遥远系统中跨尺度的人与自然的动态有何影响？远程耦合和本地耦合如何在其对人-自然动态的影响方面相互增强或相互抵消？为了解决这些问题和相关假设，该项目将侧重于巴西和中国这两个世界上最重要的新兴经济体之间涉及农产品贸易(例如，用于食用和动物饲料的大豆)的主要远程对接。这两个国家构成了远程耦合系统的一个很好的例子，但人们对它们快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的新数据，研究人员将对远程耦合系统的关键组件之间的复杂动态和关系进行建模。将使用广泛使用的全球贸易分析项目模式在国际和国家范围内进行分析。此外，还将通过生态实地调查和社会经济调查，以及通过开发和验证基于代理人的远程耦合模式，在区域和地方两级进行深入研究。这些研究跨越了当地到国际的范围，将通过系统集成加以结合。

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.