New approaches to quantifying global ecosystems including dynamical human interactions

量化全球生态系统（包括动态人类互动）的新方法

• 批准号: RGPIN-2020-04889
• 负责人: Galbraith, Eric
• 金额: $ 5.46万
• 依托单位: McGill University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=717444
• 关键词: New; approaches; quantifying; global; ecosystems

Global ecosystems are being transformed at rates that probably have not occurred since the end of the Cretaceous, as a result of human activities. Attempts to understand this transformation are being undertaken by many thousands of researchers, yielding a great wealth of detailed knowledge. But these efforts are often isolated within disciplines, so that the full interacting system - including human activity - is rarely studied within a common quantitative framework. This conceptual fragmentation leaves important gaps in the understanding of how entire ecosystems function within the physical environment of the Earth surface, and ignores the valuable information that observations of humans can potentially shed on ecosystem functioning. My research program builds on my background in modeling climate, biogeochemistry and ecosystems, and is now oriented towards a better understanding of the human-ecosystem interface by developing an integrated, quantitative framework that resolves the global ecosystem including its human component. The approach is built on recent advances in macroecology, that provide a novel means to predict whole terrestrial and marine ecosystems from environmental features with relatively few equations, based on body size and principles of energy flow. These ecosystem models will be coupled to simple representations of human activities, suitable for centennial-timescale integrations and tailored to maximize the use of available data constraints. The general goals are to provide a more holistic understanding of ecosystems, including humans, while shedding new light on the functioning of biological systems by leveraging global observations of human activity. This proposal takes a major step forward through four workpackages. First, the development of a global two-dimensional Surface Earth System Model - the first of its kind - will allow terrestrial and marine ecosystems to be fully integrated with human populations in a computationally-efficient design. Second, a major expansion and refinement of our prior size-based marine ecosystem model, will improve realism and connect ecosystem processes with biogeochemical cycling. Third, construction of new size-based ecosystem approaches for the land surface, tailored to use the large global datasets available for model calibration, and to provide the standard basis for the grid-based ecological components. Fourth, a dynamic, interactive, generalized model of human populations and their activities, which can be applied to simulate the large-scale features of biomass extraction by humans, the ecosystem impacts, and how they changed over human prehistory and history. These four workpackages will achieve critical technical advances, paving the way for further steps in the research program, while contributing to hypothesis development and refinement that are likely to produce unexpected discoveries in the short term.

由于人类活动，全球生态系统正在以自白垩纪末期以来可能从未发生过的速度发生变化。成千上万的研究人员正在尝试理解这种转变，产生了大量的详细知识。但是，这些努力往往是在学科中孤立的，因此，包括人类活动在内的整个相互作用的系统很少在一个共同的定量框架内进行研究。这种概念上的碎片化在理解整个生态系统如何在地球表面的物理环境中发挥作用方面留下了重要的空白，并且忽略了人类观察可能对生态系统功能产生的有价值的信息。