Land Systems Dynamics, Vulnerability and Adaptation in a Transfrontier Conservation Area

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NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONGEOGRAPHY SPATIAL SCIENCES (GSS) PROGRAMThis interdisciplinary research project will provide new knowledge regarding how the environment, institutions, and land use affect household and community vulnerability. It also will identify potential leverage points where changes in adaptive capacity will reduce vulnerability. The project will expand knowledge regarding how feedback from human-environment interactions affect vulnerability in a region characterized by increasing environmental uncertainty. The findings from this project will strengthen the theoretical framework of political ecology by identifying linkages between household vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The project will have a strong focus on educational and research capacity building in the study region, fostering collaboration between U.S. and African institutions and providing a strong foundation for interdisciplinary education and training of undergraduate and graduate students. Project results also will promote locally based collaborative ties with national and international partners to address issues of land and resource stewardship.To understand relationships among vulnerability, resource use, and environmental variability, this project will study the adaptive capacity of a system to adjust, modify, or change its characteristics in response to shocks or stress. The research will focus on the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa, the largest internationally managed, terrestrial conservation area in the world. By examining interactions among environmental variability, resource use, and household vulnerability, the investigators will determine if, and at what spatial scale, land-use decisions are best detected on the landscape. The main goals of this project are to identify the socioecological conditions and patterns that affect household and community vulnerability and to determine leverage points that may aid in mitigating how land-use decisions and land-cover change affect vulnerability. The investigators will combine household surveys and participatory mapping to characterize how indicators of vulnerability shape smallholders' land use decisions. Data on the environment, market factors, government policy and subsidies, culture and ethnicity, and the presence and intervention of non-governmental organizations will be integrated with remotely sensed imagery to compare trajectories of land-use and land-cover change with underlying socioecological drivers. An integrated, quantitative modeling framework will evaluate the strength of the hypothesized associations among aspects of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. By advancing the understanding of vulnerability, this research will identify how vulnerability influences and is affected by socioeconomic and biophysical drivers at multiple scales.