Collaborative Research: Climate, land use, and the rise and fall of powerful Sub-Saharan African societies

预测土地利用和气候变化对现代社会的影响的关键信息可以来自重建过去主要文化的环境和轨迹。 埃塞俄比亚有三个特点，使其成为了解环境和土地利用之间的相互作用对社会发展影响程度的最重要地点之一。 首先，非洲社会目前正遭受土地使用和气候变化的后果。 第二，其人类定居的悠久历史包括大迁徙、农业起源和重要文明的兴衰;所有这些都与土地利用和生态变化有着不完全的联系。 第三，埃塞俄比亚的地形提供了气候梯度，在其中开发和校准重建古环境的方法。 研究人员将利用第二个财产来重建埃塞俄比亚北方一个地区过去7000年的古环境，该地区可能是农业起源的中心，其中有几个复杂的社会兴起和衰落。 利用第三种特性的实验也将在沿着气候和海拔梯度的研究站进行。 本项目研究的一个主要假设是，气候、土地利用和居住在埃塞俄比亚北方高地的社会兴衰之间存在可重复的关系。 该项目还解决了重建过去环境的两个问题：1）解释的准确性，以及2）因此分离气候和土地使用的影响。 将使用几种方法来重建环境，包括土壤学和地层学分析，土壤有机质中几种元素的大量和稳定同位素分析，以及流域水文模型。 环境和土地使用不是影响社会进步和衰落的唯一因素。尽管如此，越来越多的证据表明，根据对环境和土地利用相互作用的了解作出的资源利用决定，使一些最古老的社会得以保持高水平的发展。 该项目可以直接为埃塞俄比亚干旱和饥荒多发高地的土地使用管理决策提供信息。 这项研究将为美国和埃塞俄比亚的本科生、研究生和博士后研究人员提供培训机会。 它还将促进两国科学家之间的合作。该项目由国际科学与工程办公室共同资助。

Key information for predicting the effects of land uses and climatic change on modern societies can come from reconstructing the environments and trajectories of major cultures of the past. Ethiopia has three properties that make it among the most important locations for understanding the extent to which interactions between environment and land use influence societal developments. First, its societies presently suffer consequences of land use and climate change. Second, its long history of human settlement includes great migrations, an agricultural origin, and the rise and fall of important civilizations; all with incompletely understood links to land use and ecological change. Third, Ethiopia's topography provides gradients of climates in which to develop and calibrate methods of reconstructing paleoenvironments. The researchers will take advantage of the second property to reconstruct the paleoenvironments of the past 7000 years in an area of northern Ethiopia that was a probable center of origin of agriculture and in which several sophisticated societies have risen and fallen. Experiments that take advantage of the third property will also be conducted at research stations along a climate and elevation gradient. A major hypothesis examined for this project is that there are repeatable relationships between climate, land use, and the rise and fall of the societies that have inhabited the highlands of northern Ethiopia. The project also addresses two problems with reconstructing past environments: 1) accuracy of interpretation, and 2) separating effects of climate and land use as a result. Several methods will be used to reconstruct environment; including pedological and stratigraphic analyses, bulk and stable isotopic analyses of several elements in soil organic matter, and modeling of basin hydrology. Environment and land use are not the only factors that influence a society's advances and declines. Nonetheless, evidences are accumulating that decisions about resource use informed by knowledge of environment and land use interactions have permitted some of the oldest societies to persist at high levels of development. The project can directly inform land use management decisions in the drought and famine prone highlands of Ethiopia. The research will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher in both the United States and Ethiopia. It will also promote collaboration between scientists in the two countries. This project is cofunded by the Office of International Science and Engineering.