Sustaining Populations and Landscapes at Risk: Adaptation in American Grasslands

描述（由申请人提供）：很少有事件像美国尘暴区那样对全球理解人类引起的环境变化如此重要。该应用程序要求支持通过开发丰富的人-环境系统信息集成来探索美国草原环境与人口损失之间的关系。它将重点从衡量新定居地区的个人和家庭水平变化扩展到分析气候压力和全球化条件下的成熟社区。言下之意，这种方法要求在理解经济因素和对变化的动态有长远的看法方面更加现实。为了研究人类和景观在压力下的脆弱性，该项目将试点创建一个关于人类、农场和景观的独一无二的数据集：从堪萨斯州农业人口普查中收集个人层面的信息，从契约登记册中收集土地包裹和抵押贷款信息，从航空照片时间序列中收集土地覆盖数据，从数字土壤调查中收集土壤质量数据，从历史气候数据集中收集天气数据。在20世纪50年代和70年代，干旱再次侵袭该地区，堪萨斯州继续进行年度农业人口普查。拟议的数据集将是第一个开发高分辨率的人口和土地利用变化的多代历史的数据集，并将其与土地覆盖、土壤质量、

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Few events are as important to global understanding of human-induced environmental change as the American Dust Bowl. This application requests support to explore the relationship between environment and population loss in the American grasslands by developing a rich integration of information on human- environment systems. It extends a focus on measuring individual and household level change in new settlement areas, to the analysis of mature communities under conditions of climate stress and globalization. By implication, this approach demands a greater realism in understanding the economic factors and a long run view of the dynamics of change. To study the vulnerability of people and landscapes under stress, the project will pilot the creation a one-of-a-kind dataset on people, farms and landscapes: gathering individual level information from Kansas State agricultural census rolls, land parcel and mortgage lending information from deed registers, land cover data from a time series of aerial photographs, soil quality from digital soil surveys, and weather data from historical climate datasets. As drought revisited the region in the 1950s and 1970s, the State of Kansas continued to conduct annual censuses of agriculture. The proposed dataset will be the first of its kind to develop high-resolution multigenerational histories of population and land use change and integrate them with spatially explicit information on land cover, soil quality, climate, capital formation, market prices and participation in government programs. This synthetic approach will allow for the testing of the hypotheses from both household-centered and vulnerability-assessment theory about the impact of population loss on livelihood strategies and adaptive capacity, and contribute to the broader science of identifying thresholds of change in human-environment systems.