RII Track-4: Governing Social-Ecological Transformation across Working Landscapes

非技术描述水的可获得性、土壤健康和生态系统服务，如野生动物栖息地、水过滤和碳封存，提高了农业生产力和人类社区的可持续性。在美国的农业景观中，同时管理这些要素是一个越来越大的挑战。虽然生态学家和农业科学家在确定最佳做法以最大限度地提高商品生产和保持相关生态系统的健康方面取得了重大进展，但还需要努力查明和量化支持生产性农业和社区可持续性的社会因素。恢复或改造严重退化的农业景观往往需要一次以上的政策改变或强化管理做法。该奖学金通过一项高度跨学科的研究来满足这一需求，该研究涉及开发一种创新的统计方法，用于分析美国农业景观的社会和生态数据组合并产生洞察力。该奖学金使来自蒙大拿大学的社会科学家PI能够与内布拉斯加州大学林肯分校的生态学家合作，开发一种统计方法，以确定自20世纪30年代沙尘暴时代以来在内布拉斯加州中部的中普拉特河分水岭发生的离散社会和生态转型的证据。这一分析将用于区分可用于通过改善生态系统健康的景观规模来改善退化农业系统的具体政策机制。这项研究和相关的合作伙伴关系将直接支持跨学科研究生教育，并提供一个统计分析工具，旨在克服生态学和社会科学之间持续存在的学科障碍，实现数据整合。技术说明这项研究的目标是更好地了解人类主导的全美退化农业系统转型的潜力。研究人员将开发定量方法，更有力地识别导致系统性制度转变的社会和生态耦合过程。这将通过分析内布拉斯加州中部中普拉特河流域各种社会和生物物理过程的时间序列数据集来实现。中普拉特河农业系统是一个数据丰富的测试案例，自沙尘暴以来，发生了多种社会生态制度转变。研究目标和方法包括：(1)收集现有数据集，代表自20世纪30年代大平原农业转型以来的关键环境过程(如用水、水质、农业生产数据)和社会变化(如人口统计数据、公众对农业的态度)；(2)利用Fisher信息进行不连续性分析，以发现并统计解释多变量数据中的政权变迁的证据；以及(3)利用统计分析(QCA)对已确定的政权变迁之前、之后和期间影响农业景观的治理变迁进行表征，并利用定性的档案数据，如当地农业法律、政策和行业或社区期刊。描述围绕中普拉特河流域过去政权转变的治理将有助于研究人员进一步解释治理的潜力，以扼杀或支持社会生态系统从退化的政权向更可持续的政权转变。这项研究有助于越来越多的知识提出适应性和变革性的治理进程，以此作为减轻、适应并可能改变社会生态系统以应对全球环境变化影响的手段。具体地说，这项研究解决了面对自然和人为变化时对生产力、可持续性和弹性的需求。

Non-technical DescriptionWater availability, soil health, and ecosystem services such as wildlife habitat, water filtration, and carbon sequestration enhance the potential for both agricultural productivity and sustainability of human communities. Managing for these elements simultaneously is an increasing challenge across U.S. agricultural landscapes. Although ecologists and agricultural scientists have made substantial progress in determining best practices to maximize both commodity production and retention of the health of associated ecosystems, efforts are also needed to identify and quantify the societal elements that support productive agriculture and community sustainability. Restoring or transforming severely degraded agricultural landscapes often requires more than a single policy change or intensified management practices alone. This fellowship addresses this need through a highly interdisciplinary study involving the development of an innovative, statistical approach for analyzing and generating insights from combined sets of social and ecological data on U.S. agricultural landscapes. The fellowship enables the PI, a social scientist from the University of Montana, to partner with ecologists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to develop a statistical method for identifying evidence of discrete social and ecological transitions that have occurred in the Middle Platte River watershed of central Nebraska since the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. This analysis will be applied to distinguish specific policy mechanisms that could be employed to improve degraded agricultural systems through landscape-scale improvements in ecosystem health. This research and the associated partnerships will directly support interdisciplinary graduate education as well as provide a statistical analysis tool designed to overcome persistent disciplinary barriers to data integration between ecological and social scientists.Technical DescriptionThe goal of this research is to better understand the potential for human-led transformations of degraded agricultural systems across the U.S. Researchers will develop quantitative methods for more robust identification of coupled social and ecological processes that have led to systemic regime shifts. This will be achieved by analyzing time-series datasets for a variety of both social and biophysical processes in the Middle Platte River watershed of central Nebraska. The Middle Platte River agricultural system is a data-rich test case where multiple social-ecological regime shifts have occurred since the Dust Bowl. Research objectives and methods include: (1) gathering available datasets representing key environmental processes (e.g. water use, water quality, agricultural production data) and social shifts (e.g. demographics, public attitudes toward agriculture) since the 1930s agricultural transition in the Great Plains; (2) performing discontinuity analysis using Fisher information to detect and statistically explain evidence of regime shifts in the multivariate data; and (3) characterizing shifts in governance affecting agricultural landscapes before, after, and during identified regime shifts using statistical analysis (QCA) of qualitative, archival data such as local agricultural laws, policies, and industry or community periodicals. Characterizing the governance surrounding past regime shifts in the Middle Platte River watershed will help researchers further explain the potential of governance to either stifle or support social-ecological system transformation from degraded to more sustainable regimes. This research contributes to a growing body of knowledge suggesting adaptive and transformative governance processes as means to mitigate, adapt to, and potentially transform social-ecological systems in response to the impacts global environmental change. Specifically, this research addresses the need for productivity, sustainability, and resilience in the face of natural and human-caused changes.