BE/CNH: Land-Use and Landscape Socioecology in the Mediterranean Basin: A Natural Laboratory for the Study of the Long-Term Interaction of Human and Natural Systems

所有现代社会最终都依赖于农业和畜牧业的产品。 大约1万年前，当这种农牧经济首次出现在全新世早期的地中海盆地时，它代表了人类生态的戏剧性重组。 它涉及到农业人民越来越密集的努力，以控制有利于家养动植物生命周期的环境因素，从而对区域景观和人类社会产生复杂的相互关联的影响。 农牧土地利用仍然是人类影响自然景观的最重要方式，这些影响的递归社会影响是重要的全球性问题。 然而，景观演变发生在几十年，几个世纪，甚至几千年的过程中。 即使是一个景观支持一个民族及其生计经济的能力的丧失，也往往是长期变化的结果，这些变化在史前记录的分辨率上最为明显。 只有通过研究这些长期记录，人们才能真正开始理解过去和现在的土地使用决策对地球景观和社会的真实的后果，并利用这种理解在今天做出更明智的决策。 关于人类活动如何改变世界的最长和最好的研究记录是在地中海盆地发现的，其中包括已知最早的农业土地使用和最早的文明依赖于这些人类管理的社会生态系统。 几十年来，考古学家、地球科学家和生态学家的深入研究积累了丰富多样的关于该地区人类与环境相互作用的数据。 这个跨学科的研究项目将把这些信息与地理空间建模和代理模拟的最新进展相结合，以创建一个自然实验室，用于调查替代土地利用做法的长期社会和生态后果。 在本项目中，模拟实验室将用于研究（1）农牧系统增长对生物多样性的影响;（2）土地利用集约化和多样化对景观的影响，其恢复力和退化的脆弱性;以及（3）人类在不同环境和社会背景下维持社会生态系统的长期可持续性。 这项研究将侧重于地中海盆地两端的两个生态多样性地区，即西班牙东部和约旦的黎凡特南部。 这两个区域涵盖了整个地中海盆地的大部分社会和自然可变性，该项目将产生关于替代土地使用做法的长期后果的重要新知识，可帮助社区对当今的土地使用作出更负责任和更有效的决定。 它还将生成综合的考古和古环境数据集，以及动态土地利用景观建模算法，这些算法将通过互联网，会议和出版物传播，供研究人员解决其他社会生态问题。 该研究与本科生和研究生的积极教育计划紧密结合，特别是面向研究过程中的动手培训和跨学科合作工作。 这包括与亚利桑那地理联盟建立K-12外联伙伴关系，并与教育工作者合作，共同开发和传播课程，使科学学习能够在不让一个孩子掉队立法的核心要求范围内进行。 该项目得到了2004财政年度环境中生物复杂性特别竞赛的资助，该竞赛侧重于自然和人类系统耦合的动力学。

All of modern society depends ultimately on the products of agriculture and animal herding. When this agropastoral economy first appeared in the Mediterranean basin in the early Holocene, nearly 10,000 years ago, it represented a dramatic reorganization of human ecology. It involved increasingly intensive efforts by farming peoples to control environmental factors favorable to the life cycle of domestic plants and animals, with a consequent cascade of complexly interlinked effects on regional landscapes and human society. Agropastoral land use remains the most significant way in which humans impact natural landscapes, and the recursive social effects of these impacts are important global issues. However, landscape evolution takes place over the course of decades, centuries, and even millennia. Even the loss of a landscape's ability to support a people and their subsistence economy is often the result of longer-term changes that are most apparent at the resolution of the prehistoric record. Only by studying this long-term record can people truly begin to appreciate the real consequences of past and present land-use decisions on earth's landscapes and society and use this understanding to make more informed decisions today. The longest and best-studied record of the ways in which human activities have transformed the world is found in the Mediterranean Basin, encompassing both the earliest known agricultural land use and the earliest civilizations to become dependent on these human-managed socioecosystems. Decades of intensive study by archaeologists, geoscientists, and ecologists have amassed rich and diverse data about human-environmental interaction in this region. This interdisciplinary research project will integrate this information with recent advances in geospatial modeling and agent simulation to create a natural laboratory for investigating the long-term social and ecological consequences of alternate land-use practices. In this project, the modeling laboratory will be used to study (1) the effects the of growth in agropastoral systems on biodiversity; (2) the changing impacts of land-use intensification and diversification on landscapes, their resilience, and vulnerability to degradation; and (3) the long-term sustainability of human maintained socioecosystems in varying environmental and social contexts. The study will focus on two ecologically diverse regions at opposite ends of the Mediterranean Basin, eastern Spain and the southern Levant in Jordan. These two regions encompass much of the social and natural variability of the entire Mediterranean Basin.This project will generate significant new knowledge about long-term consequences of alternative land-use practices that can help communities make more responsible and effective decisions about land use today. It will also generate integrated archaeological and paleoenvironmental datasets, and dynamic land use-landscape modeling algorithms that will be disseminated via the internet, conferences, and publications for use by researchers addressing other socioecological questions. The research is tightly integrated with an active educational program for undergraduate and graduate students especially geared towards hands on training in the research process, and collaborative transdisciplinary work. This includes a K-12 outreach partnership with the Arizona Geographic Alliance and collaboration with educators to co-develop and disseminate curricula that enables science learning within the context of core requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2004 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.