IBSS: Towards an Integrated Understanding of Natural Resource Use and Management

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This interdisciplinary research project will examine variations in the ways that different human societies have managed natural resources. Scientists long have debated how environmental, demographic, institutional, social, and historical factors shape the natural resource management strategies used by different societies and why these strategies change over time. Diverse natural resource management approaches have allowed humans to inhabit every continent on earth, including such varied settings as deserts, rainforests, savannas, tundra, mountains, and plains. The degree to which society can use and manage resources sustainably is a primary determinant of current and future well-being. This project will provide global-scale empirical tests of possible answers to critical questions in long-standing debates regarding the geography and evolution of land tenure and subsistence strategies. The investigators will demonstrate the utility of approaches developed in biogeography and evolutionary biology for addressing theoretical issues from multiple disciplines regarding drivers of global geographic patterns in natural resource management. Project findings will provide policy makers and others with critical insights about the constraints and opportunities different contexts offer for more sustainable planning. The project will demonstrate the utility of a global, publicly accessible, interdisciplinary database developed by the investigators to facilitate studies of cultural diversity and other dimensions of resource management and use. The project also will valuable interdisciplinary education and training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students for for post-doctoral researchers.The investigators will address three critical questions: (1) To what degree do different factors determine subsistence strategies and land tenure systems across different regions of the globe? (2) Do predictable patterns of change exist, or can any form of subsistence or land tenure turn into any other form over time? (3) Do subsistence strategies and land-tenure systems co-evolve? Consideration of these questions has been difficult due to the limitations of prior analytical approaches. The investigators have demonstrated the utility of methods originally developed in biogeography and evolutionary biology to explore the factors that drive the evolution and geographic patterns of cultural diversity, and they have assembled a database that maps more than 100 cultural features onto language family trees for over about 1,400 societies. They will link these data with data on ecological and environmental variables in order to conduct new inquiries into the drivers of cultural change and patterns of cultural diversity. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.