Sustaining Populations and Landscapes at Risk: Adaptation in American Grasslands

描述(由申请者提供)：对于全球理解人类引起的环境变化，很少有事件能像美国沙尘暴那样重要。该应用程序要求通过开发丰富的人类-环境系统信息集成来探索环境与美国草原人口减少之间的关系。它将重点放在衡量新聚居区的个人和家庭水平变化上，并将重点扩展到在气候压力和全球化条件下对成熟社区的分析。言下之意，这种方法需要更现实地理解经济因素，并对变化的动态有长远的看法。为了研究人和景观在压力下的脆弱性，该项目将试点创建一个关于人、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登记册收集个人水平信息，从地契登记簿收集地块和抵押贷款信息，从航空照片时间序列收集土地覆盖数据，从数字土壤调查收集土壤质量，从历史气候数据集中收集天气数据。20世纪50年代和70年代，当干旱再次袭击该地区时，堪萨斯州继续进行年度农业普查。拟议的数据集将是此类数据集的第一个，它将建立高分辨率的人口和土地利用变化的多代历史，并将它们与土地覆盖、土壤质量、 气候、资本形成、市场价格和对政府项目的参与。这一综合方法将允许检验以家庭为中心的理论和脆弱性评估理论中关于人口减少对生计战略和适应能力的影响的假设，并有助于确定人类-环境系统变化阈值的更广泛的科学。

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.