BE/CNH: Feedbacks Among Forestry, Agriculture, and Fire in Amazonia

随着亚马逊流域的农村经济与世界市场联系在一起，新的伐木和森林砍伐浪潮将随之而来。这一趋势的潜在后果包括：依赖森林的降雨减少、类似稀树草原的灌丛植被蔓延、生物多样性大量丧失以及温室气体排放增加。加大对新公路走廊治理的投资和加强以森林为基础的经济，可能有利于走一条维持森林生态系统的更公平和可持续的发展道路。然而，人们对能够促进这一替代途径的政策干预知之甚少，部分原因是亚马逊地区的生态、经济和气候系统在多个尺度、空间和时间尺度上的复杂相互作用。这个跨学科的研究项目将为一条主要的新公路走廊和整个流域开发定量的、空间明确的亚马逊土地利用变化、火灾、植被动态和碳通量模型。生态系统模型将火灾风险描述为干旱、土地利用和扰动历史的函数，并将通过土地利用对火灾制度的影响以及通过火灾风险对土地使用者行为的影响与经济模型相耦合。生态系统模型将跟踪植被结构和相关碳库的恢复，以估计与土地利用情景相关的碳通量和可燃性。经济模型将首先计算竞争的农业和林业土地使用的每个像元的潜在盈利能力，作为基础设施和生物物理因素的函数，利用卫星数据和大型地理信息系统数据库确定。实际占用每个像素的土地使用将取决于人口和城市化变量，这些变量是在市级人口普查数据的计量经济模型中捕获的，并且在元胞自动机模型中表示空间关联。生态和经济模型将由已经在亚马逊地区铺设的五条主要公路走廊中的两条沿线进行的实地研究提供支持。拟议的研究将为热带边境地区开发第一个空间明确的模拟模型，该模型将土地使用者的寻租行为与形成这种行为的生态和气候过程结合起来。该模型将用于评估区域经济和生态系统对基础设施投资、监管和财政干预、宏观经济因素和气候变化的反应，从而可能提高该地区决策过程的科学质量。本研究为跨学科教育计划提供了基础，该计划支持培养至少16名博士和15名硕士水平的学生。跨学科的研究生课程、三语教科书和教育模拟模型将与NSF的一个IGERT项目合作开发。该项目得到了2004年度环境生物复杂性特别竞赛的支持，该竞赛侧重于自然和人类系统耦合动力学。

As the rural economies of the Amazon Basin become tied to world markets, new pulses of logging and deforestation will follow. Potential consequences of this trend include a reduction of forest-dependent rainfall, the spread of savanna-like scrub vegetation, substantial losses of biodiversity, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. Greater investments in governance of new highway corridors and the strengthening of forest-based economies could favor a more equitable and sustainable developmental pathway that maintains the forest ecosystem. Policy interventions that could foster this alternative pathway are poorly understood, however, in part because of the complex interactions among ecological, economic, and climatic systems operating across multiple scales spatial and temporal scales in the Amazon region. The interdisciplinary research project will develop quantitative, spatially explicit models of Amazon land-use change, fire, vegetation dynamics, and carbon flux for a major new highway corridor and for the entire basin. The ecosystem model will describe fire risk as a function of drought, land use, and disturbance history, and will be coupled to the economic models through land-use effects on the fire regime and through fire-risk effects on the behavior of land users. The ecosystem model will track vegetation structure and recovery with associated carbon pools to estimate the carbon fluxes and flammability associated with land-use scenarios. The economic models will first calculate the potential profitability of each pixel for competing agricultural and forestry land uses as a function of infrastructure and biophysical factors determined using satellite data and a large GIS database. Land uses that actually occupy each pixel will depend on population and urbanization variables that are captured within an econometric model of municipal-level census data and spatial associations that are represented within a cellular automata model. Ecological and economic modeling will be supported by field research already underway along two of the five major highway corridors that are being paved in Amazonia.The proposed research would develop the first spatially explicit simulation model for a tropical frontier region that integrates the rent-seeking behavior of land users with the ecological and climatic processes that shape this behavior. The model will be designed to assess the responses of regional economies and ecosystems to infrastructure investments, regulatory and fiscal interventions, macroeconomic factors, and climatic change, and may therefore increase the scientific quality of the region's policy-making process. This research provides the foundation for a program of interdisciplinary education that supports the training of at least 16 doctoral and 15 masters-level students. Interdisciplinary graduate field courses, a tri-lingual textbook, and an educational simulation model will be developed in collaboration with an NSF IGERT program. 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.