CNH: Collab Research: The Interactions of Climate Change, Land-Management Policies, and Forest Succession on Fire Hazard and Ecosystem Trajectories in the Wildland-Urban Interface

该项目将通过探索俄勒冈州西部威拉米特谷生态区气候和土地利用变化的联合影响，确定减少野火危害和濒危生态系统损失的方法。 将测试三个假设：气候变化将增加燃料负荷和野火危害;土地开发将增加荒地-城市界面面积，并以增加野火风险和受损生态系统损失的方式改变植被;在未来一系列气候情景中，一些管理选项在减轻火灾风险和维持受损生态系统方面将比其他选项更强大。 这项工作将采用一个生物物理模型，从目前气候变化模型的粗略空间尺度缩小到人类土地利用和管理决策的精细空间尺度，然后再缩小到人类活动对植被和火灾的影响。 生物物理模型将与基于代理人的模型相结合，在该模型中，各个地块的决策者对气候、土地使用法规和激励措施、土地市场、感知火灾危险、土地管理成本和美学做出反应。 这项研究将推进如何弥合与多种类型的系统不确定性，不同的空间和时间尺度，以及耦合的自然和人类系统之间的复杂相互作用和反馈相关的关键理论和实践问题的知识。 在荒地-城市界面发生灾难性野火的风险是一个日益严重的全国性威胁，预计气候变化可能会加剧。 该项目通过提供预测风险和减轻影响的工具，支持正在出现的国家、区域和地方举措。 全球气候变化模型已变得越来越机械化、复杂化和空间明确化。 然而，关于生物系统和人类文化系统如何在土地利用和管理决策的空间尺度上对气候变化作出反应的互动模型的发展仍处于起步阶段。 这项研究将产生一个可转移的方法来建模这样的系统，是易于处理的，空间上明确的，并直接链接到基于政策的决策。 发展的解决方案，是强大的未来的不确定性是一个重要的方法，适应性管理复杂的系统，包括强耦合的生态和社会经济过程。 该项目吸引了两所大学的研究生和本科生进行跨学科研究。它还让学生与利益攸关方团体一起参加讲习班，以支持政策制定者和公众作出更明智的决定，应对气候变化的挑战。

This project will identify ways to reduce wildfire hazard and the loss of imperiled ecosystems by exploring the joint effects of climate and land use changes in western Oregon's Willamette Valley Ecoregion. Three hypotheses will be tested: climate change will increase fuel loads and wildfire hazard; land development will increase the area of wildland-urban interface and alter vegetation in ways that increase the risk of wildfire and loss of imperiled ecosystems; and some management options will be more robust than others in mitigating fire risk and sustaining imperiled ecosystems across a range of future climate scenarios. The work will employ a biophysical model that downscales from the coarse spatial scales of current climate change models to the fine spatial scales at which human land use and management decisions are made, and then scales back up to represent the landscape-scale effects of human actions on vegetation and fire hazard. The biophysical model will be coupled with an agent-based model in which decision makers on individual land parcels respond to climate, land use regulation and incentives, land markets, perceived fire hazard, land management costs, and aesthetics. This research will advance knowledge of how to bridge key theoretical and practical issues related to multiple types of system uncertainties, different spatial and temporal scales, and complex interactions and feedbacks among coupled natural and human systems. The risk of catastrophic wildfire in the wildland-urban interface is a growing nationwide threat that projected climate change is likely to exacerbate. This project supports emerging national, regional and local initiatives by providing tools to forecast risks and mitigate the impacts. Global climate change models have become increasingly mechanistic, sophisticated and spatially explicit. However, the development of interactive models of how biological and human cultural systems will respond to climate change at the spatial scales at which land use and management decisions are made is in its infancy. This research will produce a transferable methodology for modeling such systems that is tractable, spatially explicit, and directly linked to policy-based decision-making. The development of solutions that are robust to future uncertainties is an important approach toward adaptively managing complex systems that include strongly coupled ecological and socio-economic processes. The project engages graduate and undergraduate students in interdisciplinary research at two universities. It also involves students with stakeholder groups in workshops designed to support policy makers and the public in making more informed decisions that address the challenges of climate change.