CNH: The Complexities of Ecological and Social Diversity: A Long-Term Perspective

保护文化和生物多样性的呼吁经常出现在新闻中。 保护多样性不仅是生态学家、人类学家、自然资源保护主义者和土地管理者的研究课题，也是社会运动和政府政策的明确目标。 该研究项目将研究社会和生态多样性如何相互作用，以影响社会或环境状况面临重大变化的社会的复原力。 研究人员进行这个项目的目标是发现生态景观和社会组织形式的多样性配置，使系统或多或少能够科普重大的环境或社会变化，而不会经历令人不快的转变。 研究人员将重点关注一些重要的变量，这些变量既表明社会多样性（整合，整合和等级），也表明生态多样性（植物和动物物种的多样性以及景观上的斑块）。 为了了解利益关系，他们将开发关键变量相互作用的数学模型，并对数千年社会轨迹的实证研究数据进行广泛的定量分析。 他们将研究来自美国西南部和北方墨西哥的五个考古案例，作为长期的“实验”，以了解社会和生态领域的多样性如何影响这些社会在面对不同的环境或社会刺激时蓬勃发展或迫使它们发生巨大变化的能力。 这些分析的结果将提供动态建模的基础，旨在调查广泛的条件下，这些领域的多样性有助于不同的反应，在不同的时间尺度上的变化。 使用动力系统和数值技术进行的模型分析将开始与简单的社会情况加上简单的景观，然后逐步修改，旨在“复杂化”的社会和生态模拟景观。 该项目将在考古分析和数学建模之间反复进行。 在实证研究中观察到的模式将为建模提供信息，建模将更抽象地检查这些关系。 然后，将根据案例研究的经验细节探讨建模预测的效果。在当代关于相互作用的社会和生态系统的研究中，对多样性的认识绝大多数依赖于短时间内的研究和观察。 该项目的重点是对美洲长期的区域规模考古序列进行个案具体的比较分析，这将为人类历史上的重要事件提供新的视角。 该项目将展示整合生态学和考古学见解的价值，平衡社会和生态过程的重要性，以及考古学有助于理解多样性在社会生态系统恢复力中的作用的能力。 当社会科普不可避免的变化时，它们的行动会产生脆弱性。 缺乏对这些动态的认识可能会导致需要进行代价高昂的变革。 当人们更清楚地认识到变化的复杂动态，就像他们过去所做的那样，人们就能更好地权衡他们的决定的影响，并建立对这种脆弱性的复原力。 该项目将展示与社会和生态多样性相关的互动如何为处理可持续性，稳健性，脆弱性和变革性变化的当代政策提供信息。 该项目还将加强从大学预科到研究生阶段的教育，因为学生和教师将从社会科学和自然科学中获得的知识结合起来，并受益于记录丰富的社会和生态多样性分析的主要数据集。 该项目由NSF耦合自然和人类系统动力学（CNH）计划支持。

Calls for preserving cultural and biological diversity regularly appear in the news. The preservation of diversity is not just a subject of study by ecologists, anthropologists, conservationists, and land managers; it is an explicit goal of social movements and governmental policies. This research project will examine how social and ecological diversity interact to influence the resilience of societies facing major changes in their social or environmental circumstances. The goal of the investigators conducting this project is to discover configurations of diversity in ecological landscapes and in forms of social organization that make systems more or less able to cope with significant environmental or social changes without undergoing an unpleasant transformation. The researchers will focus on a few important variables indicating both social diversity (integration, conformity, and hierarchy) and ecological diversity (diversity of plant and animal species and of patches on the landscape). To understand the relationships of interest, they will develop mathematical models of the interactions of key variables and conduct extensive quantitative analysis of data from empirical studies of millennium-long societal trajectories. They will examine five archaeological cases from the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico as long-term "experiments" to see how diversity in the social and ecological realms affected these societies' abilities to thrive or forced them into dramatic transformations when faced with different environmental or social stimuli. The outcomes of these analyses will provide the basis for dynamic modeling designed to investigate the broad range of conditions in which these domains of diversity contribute to varying responses to change across different time scales. Model analyses conducted using dynamical systems and numerical techniques will begin with simple social situations coupled with simple landscapes followed by step-wise modifications designed to "complexify" both social and ecological modeled landscapes. The project will move iteratively between archaeological analysis and mathematical modeling. Patterns observed in the empirical studies will inform the modeling, which will examine those relationships more abstractly. The effects predicted by the modeling then will be explored with respect to the empirical details of the case studies. Insights about diversity in contemporary research on interacting social and ecological systems have overwhelmingly relied upon studies and observations over short time spans. This project's emphasis on case-specific, comparative analysis of long-term, regional-scale archaeological sequences in the Americas will yield new perspectives regarding important episodes in human history. This project will demonstrate the value of integrating insights from ecology and archaeology, the importance of balancing concerns for social and ecological processes, and the ability of archaeology to contribute to understanding the role of diversity in the resilience of social-ecological systems. As societies cope with inevitable change, their actions generate vulnerabilities. Lack of awareness of these dynamics can contribute to the need for costly transformations. When made more aware of the complex dynamics of change as they have functioned in the past, people can better weigh the implications of their decisions and build resilience to such vulnerabilities. This project will demonstrate how interactions associated with social and ecological diversity can inform contemporary policies dealing with sustainability, robustness, vulnerability, and transformative change. This project also will enhance education from pre-collegiate through graduate levels as students and teachers integrate knowledge derived from both the social and natural sciences and benefit from primary datasets of richly documented social and ecological analyses of diversity. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.