CNH: Diversity and Disease in a Post-Trauma Urban Landscape

这一跨学科研究项目将侧重于2005年8月卡特里娜飓风在新奥尔良发生灾难性洪灾后的生态和社会经济过程。城市景观是考察相互作用、生态和人类社区的绝佳环境。经历过创伤性事件的城市地区可以成为研究生态系统和社会经济系统之间的潜在相似之处以及它们之间的反馈的非常容易处理的系统。在急性创伤导致初始状态变化的情况下，邻近或重合的城市生态和人类社区的组装和重组可以是一个耦合的动态，其结果取决于对常见强迫因素的反应或管理干预产生的相互作用。卡特里娜飓风后新奥尔良的灾难性洪水导致了一个天然实验室，用于研究自然和人类耦合系统的组装和重新组装。调查人员将确定生态和社会经济多样性在多大程度上对卡特里娜飓风引发的洪水表现出平行反应。他们还将研究作为公共卫生措施执行的干预措施如何塑造生态和社会经济多样性之间的关系和相互作用。他们将对卡特里娜飓风前后的景观异质性和社会经济变化进行基于地理信息系统的分析，并对卡特里娜飓风后的植物群落进行基于地块的清查，同时考虑洪水和社会经济分层。他们将研究挪威鼠(Rattus Norveicus)的生态和人口学，以了解洪水对人类健康的影响。挪威鼠是一种依赖于栖息地的人畜共患病病原体的主要储存库。这方面的研究将涉及以陷阱为基础的普查；丰度和扩散的种群遗传分析，以及病原体流行的组织学分析。将对工厂库存和诱捕地点附近的家庭以及四个具有不同收入和种族特征的社区的家庭进行邮件调查和面对面采访，以确定整个城市对风险的感知与暴露风险的实物衡量之间的比较。从这些研究中获得的信息将被整合到挪威老鼠人口统计学的空间显式预测模型中，以评估反映栖息地适宜性、运动和风险感知的替代控制情景的生态和人类健康结果。创伤可以对环境和社会产生持久的影响。了解生态社区和人类社区之间的相互作用将使社会更好地为预测和管理灾难性事件造成的创伤做好准备。该项目将有助于促进关于社区组成、组装和结构的不同研究领域的概念统一，并将产生在投入前所未有的资源重建新奥尔良之际促进和告知社会行动所需的新信息和见解。通过让社区合作伙伴参与，跨大学学术和公共推广计划将提供机会，在城市中利益相关者和代表性不足的群体中促进对创伤、多样性和公共卫生的认识。随着城市化因灾难性事件而使越来越多的全球人口面临风险，有关新奥尔良经历的创伤的教训将为世界各地的居民和社区决策者提供新的学术和实践价值知识。该项目得到了美国自然与人类耦合系统动力学(CNH)计划的支持。

This interdisciplinary research project will focus on ecological and socioeconomic processes following the catastrophic flooding in New Orleans associated with Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Urban landscapes are excellent settings within which to examine interactions ecological and human communities. Urban areas that have experienced a traumatic event can be highly tractable systems for studying potential parallels between ecological and socioeconomic systems as well as feedbacks among them. With acute trauma resulting in an initial state change, the assembly and reassembly of proximate or coincident urban ecological and human communities can be a coupled dynamic, where outcomes are contingent on responses to common forcing factors or interactions arising from management interventions. The catastrophic flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina resulted in a natural laboratory for investigating assembly and reassembly of coupled natural and human systems. The investigators will determine the extent to which ecological and socioeconomic diversity exhibited parallel responses to Katrina-related flooding. They also will examine how interventions executed as public health measures shaped relationships and interactions between ecological and socioeconomic diversity. They will conduct geographic information system-based analyses of landscape heterogeneity and socioeconomic variation before and after Hurricane Katrina as well as plot-based inventories of post-Katrina plant communities while accounting for flooding and socioeconomic stratification. They will examine the ecology and demography of Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus), a habitat-dependent primary reservoir of zoonotic pathogens, in order to understand human health outcomes of flooding. This facet of the research will involve a trap-based census; population genetic analysis of abundance and dispersal, and histological analysis of pathogen prevalence. Mail surveys and in-person interviews of households proximate to plant inventory and trapping sites as well as households in four neighborhoods having different income and ethnicity characteristics will be administered to determine how perceptions of risk compare to physical measures of exposure risk across the city. Information gained from these studies will be integrated into a spatially explicit predictive model of Norway rat demography to assess ecological and human-health outcomes of alternative control scenarios reflecting habitat suitability, movement, and risk perceptions.Trauma can have enduring consequences on environments and societies. Understanding the interplay between ecological and human communities will better prepare societies to anticipate and manage trauma inflicted by catastrophic events. This project will help catalyze conceptual unification of disparate fields of research on the composition, assembly, and structure of communities, and it will generate new information and insights needed to foster and inform societal action at a time when unprecedented resources are being invested to rebuild New Orleans. By involving community partners, cross-university academic and public outreach programs will provide opportunities to promote awareness of trauma, diversity, and public health across stakeholder and underrepresented groups in the city. With urbanization placing an increasingly greater proportion of the global population at risk because of catastrophic events, lessons about the traumas experienced by New Orleans will provide new knowledge of scholarly and practical value to residents and decision makers in communities around the world. This project is supported by the NSF Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) Program.