DRU. Decision-making in Rangeland systems: an integrated Ecosystem-Agent-based Modeling Approach to Resilience and change (DREAMAR)

牧场约占地球表面的25%，这些景观养活了2000多万人和世界上大多数大型动物。生活在世界这些地区的大多数人放牧家畜，有些人进行有限的耕作，因此他们直接依赖环境维持生计。但是，变化正在迅速改变这些人所依赖的环境，其原因包括人口压力、土地使用和土地保有权的变化、气候变化以及影响其谋生能力的政策变化。这个项目是关于理解人类与环境系统的不确定性和变化。通过开发与生态模型相关的基于代理的建模工作，我们将调查使这些系统中的家庭能够做出土地使用决策的社会因素，以便他们能够适应不确定性。 人们所做的决定体现在土地使用上，我们将研究这些决定对生态系统服务的影响。换句话说，人们科普变化的能力是什么，以便社会系统和生态系统仍然能够为居住在这些系统中的人和动物提供服务？因此，我们必须将家庭模型与生态模型联系起来。通过我们在蒙古、美国北方大平原和东非所做的工作，我们将调查面对变化的人类生态影响。关注家庭和社区行为的研究很重要，因为正是在这一层面上，人们对事件和变化做出了根本性的决定，也正是在这一层面上，人们的复原力得到了体现。今后，我们必须更加聪明地将潜在的“客户”与潜在的政策或技术干预相匹配。赋予（社会和生态系统）复原力的唯一方法是通过更好的目标定位能力，其中很大一部分与理解家庭如何做出决策密切相关。

Rangelands comprise about 25% of the earth's surface and these landscapes support more than 20 million people and most of the world's big animals. Most of the people who live in these regions of the world herd domestic livestock and some do limited cultivation so they are dependent directly on the environment for their livelihoods. But change is rapidly changing the environments upon which these people depend through such factors as population pressures, land use and land tenure changes, climate variability, and policy changes that affect their ability to earn a living. This project is about understanding uncertainty and change in this linked human-environment system. Through the development of agent-based modeling efforts linked to ecological models we will investigate the societal factors that enable households in these systems to make land use decisions so they can be resilient to uncertainty. Decisions that people make are expressed in land use and we will look at the effects of those decisions on ecosystem services. In other words, what is the ability of people to cope with change so that the social system and the ecological system can still provide for people and the animals that inhabit these systems? Thus it is important that we link a household model to ecological models. With work we have done in Mongolia, the northern U.S. Great Plains and in East Africa we will investigate the human-ecological effects in the face of change. Research that focuses on household and community behavior is important because it is at that level where fundamental decisions are made regarding events and changes and it is here where resilience is manifested. In the future we are going to have to be much smarter in the way that we match potential "clients" with potential policy or technical interventions. The only way to confer resilience (on social and ecological systems) is through much better targeting ability, a large part of which is intimately entwined with understanding how households make decisions.