CAREER: Analyzing the Emergence of a Complex Land Management System

当地社区能否有效地管理公共土地，或者更远的政府或非政府机构是否有必要保护我们的自然资源？多年来，研究人员认为，向个人和社区开放获取自然资源将不可避免地导致过度使用，并最终通过砍伐森林、过度捕捞、过度放牧和其他有害环境的活动而导致破坏。然而，政治学家、诺贝尔奖获得者埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆博士和她的同事随后进行的研究发现，这种“公地悲剧”的情景并不普遍。相反，一些小社区确实在没有外部监督的情况下有效地管理当地土地。这似乎最经常发生在社区拥有持久的、发展良好的社会规范来维持自然环境和制裁违反社区标准的个人时。但这些发现提出了另一个问题：如果一些社区可以做到这一点，为什么不是所有社区？为什么一些社区在保护自然资源方面是有效的，而另一些社区则不是？该奖项支持的研究试图回答这个问题。人类学家肖恩·S·唐尼博士(马里兰大学)将检验这一理论，有效的土地管理不仅仅取决于正确的社会规范；此外，他建议，社会规范、当地环境的特殊特征以及环境为当地用户提供的生态系统服务必须共同努力，以实现生态可持续。美国的一些社区既不受外部监督，又主要依赖当地的自然环境生存。因此，唐尼博士和他的团队将前往伯利兹南部偏远地区的两个以森林为基础的村庄来测试这一理论。这些社区有证明当地生态知识和环境管理的历史，但历史上几乎没有自上而下的环境管理：这是了解当地社区规范和自然生态系统动态如何相互作用并创建可持续林业系统的理想场所。研究人员将通过多种方法收集数据：家庭调查；农民土地使用访谈；以及密切监测社区如何影响他们的森林。监测将通过使用安装在无人驾驶飞行器上的GPS连接的多光谱相机拼接每个村庄周围使用区域的高分辨率照片来完成。这些照片随后将被拼接成地理参考的二维照片马赛克，通过农地调查进行地面实况调查，并进行分析，以了解这些环境如何为当地社区提供服务，它们如何受到人类耕作活动的影响，以及这些森林如何恢复以养活后代。研究小组还将进行行为经济学实验，以评估社区中的合作和惩罚与自然资源使用的关系，并使用计算分析来确定有效长期自然资源管理的最重要的社会和自然因素。该项目还有几个综合教育目标，包括在复杂性科学方面培训下一代美国科学家、教育工作者和政策制定者；开发课程作业并促进马里兰大学的跨学科合作；以及为伯利兹的美国学生提供服务性学习项目。最终，这项研究的结果将为促进地方有效管理自然资源的因素提供洞察，这可能导致更好、更有效地管理公共土地，同时显著节省成本。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Can local communities effectively manage public lands, or are more distant government or non-governmental agencies necessary to protect our natural resources? For many years, researchers argued that providing individuals and communities with open access to natural resources would inevitably lead to overuse and ultimately to destruction through deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and other environmentally detrimental activities. However, subsequent research by political scientist and Nobel laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues found that this "tragedy of the commons" scenario is not universal. Instead, some small communities do effectively manage local lands without external oversight. This appears to occur most often when communities have enduring, well-developed social norms for maintaining the natural environment and for sanctioning individuals who violate community standards. But these findings raise another question: If some communities can do it, why not all? Why are some communities effective at preserving their natural resources while others are not? The research supported by this award seeks to answer that question. Anthropologist Dr. Sean S. Downey (University of Maryland) will test the theory effective land management rests on more than just having the right social norms; in addition, he suggests, the social norms, the particular characteristics of the local environment, and the ecosystem services the environment provides to local users must work together to produce ecological sustainability.Few communities in the United States are both free of external oversight and also dependent primarily on the local natural environment for subsistence. Therefore, Dr. Downey and his team will travel to two forest-based villages located in a remote area in southern Belize to test the theory. The communities have a demonstrated history of local ecological knowledge and environmental stewardship but there has historically been little top-down environmental management: an ideal location for understanding how local community norms and natural ecosystem dynamics interact and create a sustainable forestry system. The researchers will collect data through multiple methods: household surveys; farmer land use interviews; and close monitoring of how the communities affect their forests. The monitoring will be accomplished through piecing together high-resolution photographs of the usage areas around each village using a GPS-linked multi-spectral camera mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle. These photos will subsequently be stitched together into geo-referenced two-dimensional photo-mosaics, ground-truthed through farm plots surveys, and analyzed to understand how these environments provide for the local communities, how they are affected by human farming activity, and also how these forests recover to sustain future generations. The research team will also conduct behavioral economics experiments to assess how cooperation and punishment in the communities relate to natural resource use, and use computational analysis to determine the most important social and natural factors for effective long-term natural resource management. The project also has several integrated educational goals, including training the next generation of American scientists, educators, and policy-makers in the science of complexity; developing coursework and facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration at the University of Maryland; and offering a service learning project for American students in Belize. Ultimately, findings from this research will provide insight into the factors that promote effective local management of natural resources and this could lead to better and more efficient management of public lands at a significant cost savings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.