BE/CNH: Modeling Interactions Among Urban Development, Land-Cover Change, and Bird Diversity

城市发展与生态过程之间的相互作用异常复杂。城市发展随着时间和空间的推移而演变，是个体选择和多个主体采取行动的微观相互作用的结果。这些决定通过土地的转换、自然栖息地利用的破碎化、水文系统的破坏以及能量流和营养循环的改变，影响生态系统的结构和功能。地方和区域尺度上的环境变化影响着人类的福祉和偏好，也影响着人们的决策。该项目将开发普吉特海湾中部地区城市发展和土地覆盖变化的综合模型，该模型可以与代表大量生态系统过程的模型相结合。该项目的重点是将城市发展与鸟类多样性联系起来，作为综合建模方法的一个测试案例。该方法建立在城市经济学、景观生态学、鸟类种群动力学和复杂系统科学的模型传统基础上，每个模型都为城市生态相互作用的建模提供了不同的视角。该项目将应用贝叶斯网络和多智能体微模拟方法，因为这些方法有可能在具有固有不确定性的问题领域中支持复杂的推理建模。与单独模拟城市增长及其对鸟类栖息地的影响不同，该项目将开发一个框架来模拟大都市地区在城市发展和生态过程之间动态相互作用的演变过程，并通过城市景观的空间明确表现将它们联系起来。及时、准确和透明地评估城市增长的生态影响，对健全的政策和管理决策至关重要。尽管广泛的城市研究集中在城市系统的动态及其生态相互作用上，但这些不同的城市过程尚未被综合成一个连贯的建模框架。城市和生态动力学的模拟模型在不同的知识领域发展。虽然这两个研究领域都涉及人与环境的相互作用，但它们的重点、规模、方法和目标都非常不同。本研究将探讨如何最好地模拟大都市地区耦合的社会经济和生物物理过程的复杂性和不确定性及其与政策领域的相互作用。该项目将强调在城市系统建模中明确表示人类和生态过程的重要性，包括模式、过程和影响。最终，该项目将协助确定与可能使用公共政策干预城市生态系统有关的问题的答案，以减少城市进程造成的生态破坏，同时为人们维持经济和社会上可行的城市社区。因此，该项目应有助于为决策者开发工具，以探索人类行为与环境变化之间的联系。该项目是2001年度环境生物复杂性特别竞赛颁发的奖项，重点关注自然和人类系统耦合的动力学。

The interactions between urban development and ecological processes are extraordinarily complex. Urban development evolves over time and space as the outcome of microscopic interactions of individual choices and actions taken by multiple agents. These decisions affect ecosystem structures and functions through the conversion of land, fragmentation of natural habitat use, disruption of hydrological systems, and modification of energy flow and nutrient cycles. Environmental changes at local and regional scales affect human well-being and preferences as well as the decisions people make. This project will develop an integrated model of urban development and land-cover change in the central Puget Sound region that can interface with models representing a large set of ecosystem processes. The focus of this project will be on linking urban development to bird diversity as a test case for an integrated modeling approach. This approach builds on model traditions in urban economics, landscape ecology, bird population dynamics, and complex system science, each of which offers different perspectives on modeling urban ecological interactions. The project will apply Bayesian networks and a multi-agent microsimulation approach because of the potential for those approaches to support complex inference modeling in problem domains with inherent uncertainty. Instead of separately simulating urban growth and its impacts on birds habitats, this project will develop a framework to simulate metropolitan areas as they evolve through the dynamic interactions between urban development and ecological processes and link them through a spatially explicit representation of the urban landscape.Assessments of ecological impacts of urban growth that are timely, accurate, and transparent are crucial to sound policy and management decisions. Although extensive urban research has focused on the dynamics of urban systems and their ecological interactions, these diverse urban processes have yet to be synthesized into one coherent modeling framework. Simulation models of urban and ecological dynamics have evolved in separate knowledge domains. While both of these research areas deal with human-environmental interactions, they do so with very different emphases, scale, methodology and objectives. This research will investigate how best to model complexity and uncertainty of coupled socioeconomic and biophysical processes in metropolitan regions and their interactions with the policy domain. This project will emphasize the importance of explicitly representing human and ecological processes in modeling urban systems, including patterns, processes, and impacts. Ultimately, this project will assist in identifying answers to questions related to the potential use of public policy to intervene in urban ecological systems in ways that may reduce ecological damage from urban processes while sustaining economically and socially viable urban communities for people. The project therefore should help in the development of tools for policy makers to explore the links between human behaviors and environmental change. This project is an award emanating from the FY 2001 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.