Land Systems Dynamics, Vulnerability and Adaptation in a Transfrontier Conservation Area

地理空间科学（GSS）计划这个跨学科的研究项目将提供有关环境，机构和土地利用如何影响家庭和社区脆弱性的新知识。 它还将确定适应能力的变化将减少脆弱性的潜在杠杆点。 该项目将扩大关于人类与环境相互作用的反馈如何影响一个环境不确定性日益增加的区域的脆弱性的知识。 该项目的研究结果将通过确定家庭脆弱性与适应能力之间的联系，加强政治生态学的理论框架。 该项目将重点关注研究区域的教育和研究能力建设，促进美国和非洲机构之间的合作，并为本科生和研究生的跨学科教育和培训提供坚实的基础。 项目成果还将促进当地与国家和国际伙伴的合作关系，以解决土地和资源管理问题，为了了解脆弱性、资源利用和环境可变性之间的关系，本项目将研究一个系统在应对冲击或压力时调整、修改或改变其特征的适应能力。 这项研究将侧重于南部非洲的卡万戈-赞比西河跨界保护区，这是世界上最大的国际管理的陆地保护区。 通过研究环境变异性，资源利用和家庭脆弱性之间的相互作用，调查人员将确定是否，以及在什么样的空间尺度上，土地利用决策最好地检测到的景观。该项目的主要目标是查明影响家庭和社区脆弱性的社会生态条件和模式，并确定可能有助于减轻土地使用决定和土地覆盖物变化如何影响脆弱性的杠杆点。 调查人员将把联合收割机住户调查和参与性绘图结合起来，以说明脆弱性指标如何影响小农的土地使用决定。 将把关于环境、市场因素、政府政策和补贴、文化和种族以及非政府组织的存在和干预的数据与遥感图像结合起来，以便将土地使用和土地覆盖变化的轨迹与潜在的社会生态驱动因素进行比较。 一个综合的定量建模框架将评估暴露、敏感性和适应能力等方面之间的假设关联的强度。 通过促进对脆弱性的理解，这项研究将确定脆弱性如何在多个尺度上影响社会经济和生物物理驱动因素以及受其影响。

NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONGEOGRAPHY SPATIAL SCIENCES (GSS) PROGRAMThis interdisciplinary research project will provide new knowledge regarding how the environment, institutions, and land use affect household and community vulnerability. It also will identify potential leverage points where changes in adaptive capacity will reduce vulnerability. The project will expand knowledge regarding how feedback from human-environment interactions affect vulnerability in a region characterized by increasing environmental uncertainty. The findings from this project will strengthen the theoretical framework of political ecology by identifying linkages between household vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The project will have a strong focus on educational and research capacity building in the study region, fostering collaboration between U.S. and African institutions and providing a strong foundation for interdisciplinary education and training of undergraduate and graduate students. Project results also will promote locally based collaborative ties with national and international partners to address issues of land and resource stewardship.To understand relationships among vulnerability, resource use, and environmental variability, this project will study the adaptive capacity of a system to adjust, modify, or change its characteristics in response to shocks or stress. The research will focus on the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area in southern Africa, the largest internationally managed, terrestrial conservation area in the world. By examining interactions among environmental variability, resource use, and household vulnerability, the investigators will determine if, and at what spatial scale, land-use decisions are best detected on the landscape. The main goals of this project are to identify the socioecological conditions and patterns that affect household and community vulnerability and to determine leverage points that may aid in mitigating how land-use decisions and land-cover change affect vulnerability. The investigators will combine household surveys and participatory mapping to characterize how indicators of vulnerability shape smallholders' land use decisions. Data on the environment, market factors, government policy and subsidies, culture and ethnicity, and the presence and intervention of non-governmental organizations will be integrated with remotely sensed imagery to compare trajectories of land-use and land-cover change with underlying socioecological drivers. An integrated, quantitative modeling framework will evaluate the strength of the hypothesized associations among aspects of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. By advancing the understanding of vulnerability, this research will identify how vulnerability influences and is affected by socioeconomic and biophysical drivers at multiple scales.