CNH2-L: Uncovering Metacoupled Socio-Environmental Systems

当今的全球社会环境挑战对自然科学和社会科学提出了前所未有的要求，以了解和预测一个紧密相连的世界。然而，大多数关于社会环境相互作用的研究都集中在单一的社会环境系统上。虽然有些研究单独审查了邻近或遥远系统之间的社会环境相互作用，但它们通常侧重于单向影响。虽然这些独立的研究产生了有用的信息，很少有人知道的社会环境之间的相互作用之间的关系，并在邻近和遥远的系统和同时进行。该奖项将通过解决一些世界上最大的挑战来填补这些关键的知识空白，例如跨规模和跨国界的土地使用和粮食安全。研究结果有望揭示全球粮食生产、贸易和劳动力动态的变革性见解。它们还可以揭示土地使用决策的潜在级联后果。这项创新的研究代表了一个令人兴奋的新前沿，对社会环境系统研究的理论，方法和应用做出了开创性的贡献。它将与雄心勃勃的教育和外联工作紧密结合，提高公众对复杂贸易关系的社会经济和环境影响的理解。学生和博士后将获得广泛的知识和学习重要的技能，成为未来有远见的领导者和全球参与的学者。跨学科的研究团队将应用和量化整体元耦合框架，整合社会经济环境的相互作用，以及相邻和遥远的系统之间。基本问题包括：如何进行内部耦合（例如，耦合系统内的食物生产），耦合（pericouplings）（例如，相邻系统之间的劳动力移动），以及远程耦合（例如，远距离系统之间的贸易）补充、加强和/或抵消其对社会环境反馈的影响？为了解决这一问题和其他问题，该项目将利用现有的和新的关于主要农产品大豆全球贸易的数据，以及用于商品生产的相关劳动力和资金流。将利用新的全球网格模型和其他最先进的工具进行国际/国家一级的分析。他们将通过人口普查和农业数据，生态实地考察和面对面访谈，在主要大豆出口和进口国进行区域/地方规模的深入研究，为开发和验证新的元耦合代理模型提供信息。这些研究涵盖地方到国际范围，将通过系统集成进行连接。国际研究人员将理解和模拟与利益相关者共同设计的各种情景下的元耦合系统的复杂动力学和反馈。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审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Today's global socio-environmental challenges place unprecedented demands on natural and social sciences to understand and forecast a tightly interconnected world. Yet most studies on socio-environmental interactions have focused on a single socio-environmental system. While some studies have separately examined socio-environmental interactions between adjacent or distant systems, they usually focused on one-way impacts. Although these separate studies have generated useful information, little is known about the relationships among socio-environmental interactions within and across adjacent and distant systems systematically and simultaneously. This award will fill these key knowledge gaps by addressing some of the world's biggest challenges such as land use and food security across scales and across borders. The results are expected to reveal transformational insights into global food production, trade, and labor dynamics. They can also shine light on the potential cascading consequences of land use decisions. This innovative research represents an exciting new frontier, with pioneering contributions to the theory, methods, and applications of socio-environmental systems research. It will be tightly integrated with ambitious education and outreach efforts, elevating the public's understanding of the socioeconomic and environmental effects of complex trade relationships. Students and postdoc will gain broad knowledge and learn important skills to become future visionary leaders and globally engaged scholars.The interdisciplinary research team will apply and quantify the holistic metacoupling framework that integrates socioeconomic-environmental interactions within as well as between adjacent and distant systems. Fundamental questions include: How do intracouplings (e.g., food production within a coupled system), pericouplings (e.g., labor movement between adjacent systems), and telecouplings (e.g., trade between distant systems) complement, enhance and/or offset their effects on socio-environmental feedbacks? To address this and other questions, the project will leverage existing and new data on global trade of a major agricultural commodity -- soybeans -- and associated labor and financial flows for commodity production. Analyses at the international/national scales will be conducted with new global grid-based models and other state-of-the-art tools. They will be complemented by in-depth studies at regional/local scales in key soybean exporting and importing countries through population census and agricultural data, ecological fieldwork and face-to-face interviews to inform the development and validation of a novel metacoupled agent-based model. These studies, spanning local to international scales, will be joined via systems integration. The international researchers will understand and simulate complex dynamics and feedbacks of metacoupled systems under various scenarios co-designed with stakeholders.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.