HSD: Integrated Analysis of Robustness in Dynamic Social Ecological Systems

许多社会已经经历了很长一段时间，成功地应对了环境中的不确定性、干扰和变化。在这方面，许多其他社会都失败了。这个跨学科研究项目的核心问题是，为什么一些社会生态系统在处理环境中的干扰和变化方面比其他系统更成功。研究人员来自社会、物理和工程科学领域的广泛领域，他们假设影响这个问题的一个重要因素是工程中的一个众所周知的现象：一个系统不可能对所有类别的干扰都具有健壮性。因此，在发展机制以解决现有的一系列不确定因素和环境风险(对某一类干扰变得强大)时，社会必然会变得容易受到其他类干扰的影响。通过将几种互补的定量技术应用于一套基于大量案例研究的数学模型，研究小组将在一系列简单的灌溉社会中探索这种稳健性和脆弱性之间的权衡。研究小组将利用应用数学、电气工程(控制)、资源经济学、考古学和生态学的方法和见解，开发一种综合方法来研究社会如何应对不确定性、干扰和变化。该项目的成果将是(1)一个经验数据库和一套与几个灌溉社会的基本生物物理、社会和机构特征有关的正式数学模型，(2)对社会在试图应对环境中的不确定性和变化时可能变得脆弱的更深层次的理解，以及(3)资源管理者的新工具：一套强大的机构的设计原则，这些机构在面对社会和环境干扰时都表现良好。该项目将产生关于人类社会动态和环境变化之间相互作用的基本新知识。它还将改进资源管理实践，并加强数学教育。通过将一系列学科的技术结合在一起，研究人员将开发新的工具来研究社会生态系统，这些工具能够处理比传统方法更复杂的问题。研究结果有可能改进资源管理实践，提供工具来帮助预测对干扰和环境变化的替代应对措施何时会成功，以及它们最有可能如何失败。研究成果将通过Resilience Alliance的努力转化为实践，Resilience Alliance是一个为资源管理者提供研究、教育材料和实用工具的国际组织。该研究项目将为亚利桑那州立大学正在进行的活动做出贡献，该活动旨在通过让研究生和本科生参与涉及数学、经济学、工程学、生态学和考古学的以问题为中心的跨学科研究计划，提高生命科学和社会科学的数学素养。2005财年NSF人类和社会动力学竞赛(HSD)颁发的奖项支持这一项目。NSF的所有董事和办公室都参与了HSD竞赛和HSD奖项组合的协调管理。

Many societies have endured for long periods, successfully coping with uncertainty, disturbance, and change in the environment. Many other societies have failed in this regard. The core question addressed in this interdisciplinary research project is why some social-ecological systems are more successful in dealing with disturbances and change in the environment than others. The investigators, who come from a broad range of composed of social, physical, and engineering science fields, hypothesize that an important factor bearing on this question is a well-known phenomenon in engineering: a system cannot be robust to all classes of disturbances. Thus, in developing mechanisms to address an existing suite of uncertainties and environmental risks (becoming robust to a particular class of disturbances), society necessarily becomes vulnerable to other classes of disturbances. Through the application of several complementary quantitative techniques to a suite of mathematical models based on a large set of case studies, the research team will explore such robustness-fragility trade-offs in a range of simple irrigation societies. The research team will employ methods and insights from applied mathematics, electrical engineering (control), resource economics, archaeology, and ecology to develop an integrated approach to study how societies deal with uncertainty, disturbance, and change. The products from the project will be (1) an empirical database and a suite of formal mathematical models relating to the basic biophysical, social, and institutional characteristics of several irrigation societies, (2) a deeper understanding of how societies may become fragile as they attempt to cope with uncertainty and change in the environment, and (3) new tools for resource managers: a set of design principles for robust institutions that perform well in the face of both social and environmental disturbances.This project will yield fundamental new knowledge concerning the interaction between human social dynamics and environmental change. It also will improve resource management practice and to enhance mathematical education. By bringing together techniques from a range of disciplines, the investigators will develop new tools for the study of social-ecological systems that are able to cope with more complexity than traditional approaches. The research results have the potential to improve resource management practices by providing tools to help predict when alternative responses to disturbance and environmental change will succeed and how they will most likely fail. Research findings will be translated into practice through the efforts of the Resilience Alliance, an international organization that produces research, educational materials, and practical tools for resource managers. The research project will contribute to ongoing activities at Arizona State University designed to enhance mathematical literacy in the life and social sciences by engaging both graduate and undergraduate students in a problem-focused, interdisciplinary research program involving mathematics, economics, engineering, ecology, and archeology. An award resulting from the FY 2005 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.