CNH-S: Exploring the history of coupled climatic and human influences on ecosystem changes during the last one million years

这个跨学科项目将研究气候和人类活动在地质和考古记录中反映的巨大时间跨度中影响自然生态系统的方式。科学家们越来越认识到，这些长期记录提供的见解可以在未来维持生物多样性方面发挥宝贵的作用，但要区分人类驱动的生态系统变化与过去的自然生态系统变化是非常困难的。该项目将开发一种新的方法，将计算机建模与过去一百万年的考古和地质数据的收集和分析相结合。计算机生成的模型将测试各种人类活动和气候过程如何影响环境变化的假设，这些假设可以在考古和地质数据中发现。该项目将有助于作出可适用于世界任何地方的有关人与环境的养护和管理决定。该项目还将开发高中课程材料，探索自然世界是如何被气候和人为驱动的过程塑造的，地质和考古档案提供了探索人类与自然系统在进化时间尺度上耦合的机会。挑战在于解开自然和人类系统，以及它们在过去深处的耦合。该项目概述了通过将经验地质和考古数据与生成建模相结合来研究古代人类与环境相互作用的创新方法。后者提供了一个框架，了解过程中发生的生态或人种学的时间尺度是如何反映在时间平均的化石档案。这一方法几乎可以在世界任何地方应用，将在一项关于南部非洲开普植物区系的研究中实施，该地区是教科文组织世界遗产地，也是具有全球意义的生物多样性热点。尽管这个极其多样化的生态系统正受到现代发展的日益严重的威胁，但人类影响的遗产可以追溯到数十万年前。该项目旨在解决气候和人为影响在多大程度上塑造了这一独特生态系统的进化历史，包括人类提供的生态功能对维持生物多样性的重要程度。这将通过一项计划来实现，该计划包括实地和实验室的原始数据收集，以及现有数据集的整合和建模，以将考古，古气候，古生物，古生态，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响进行评估，被认为值得支持审查标准。

This interdisciplinary project will examine the ways in which climate and human activities influence natural ecosystems over the immense timespans reflected in the geological and archaeological records. Scientists increasingly recognize that the insights provided by such long-term records can play a valuable role in sustaining biodiversity in future, yet it is exceptionally difficult to tease apart human-driven versus natural ecosystem changes in the deep past. This project will develop a new approach that integrates computer modelling with collection and analysis of archaeological and geological data spanning the last one million years. Computer-generated models will test hypotheses about how various human activities and climatic processes influence environmental changes that can be detected in archaeological and geological data. This project will help with conservation and management decisions concerning people and the environment that can be applied anywhere in the world. This project will also develop high school curricular materials to explore how the natural world is shaped by climatic and human-driven processes.Geological and archaeological archives afford the opportunity to explore coupled human-natural systems over evolutionary timescales. The challenge is to disentangle natural and human systems, and their coupling, in the deep past. This project outlines an innovative approach for studying ancient human-environment interactions by integrating empirical geological and archaeological data with generative modeling. The latter provides a framework for understanding how processes that occur over ecological or ethnographic time-scales are reflected in time-averaged fossil archives. This approach, which can be applied virtually anywhere in the world, will be implemented in a study the Cape Floristic Region in southern Africa, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and biodiversity hotspot of global significance. Although this exceedingly diverse ecosystem is under increasing threat from modern development, the legacy of human impact stretches back hundreds of millennia. This project aims to resolve the extent to which climatic and anthropogenic impacts have shaped the evolutionary history of this unique ecosystem, including the degree to which ecological functions provided by people are important to maintaining biodiversity. This will be accomplished through a program that includes primary data collection in the field and laboratory, and the integration and modelling of existing datasets to connect archaeological, paleoclimatic, paleontological, paleoecological, and geological archives that span the last one million years.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.