CAREER: Soil Pedogenesis, Agroecology, and Their Interactions

人类通过农业以几种方式影响土壤：去除养分、改变地表、改变植被等等。通过改变土壤，人们也在改变这些土壤上农业的未来潜力。这个项目以夏威夷岛为模型系统来了解几个世纪以来的农业是如何影响土壤的。夏威夷是一个很好的研究系统，因为不同年龄的熔岩流和广阔的降雨梯度结合形成了不同的土壤类型，也因为夏威夷农民在不同的土壤上使用了不同的农业策略。在当今世界努力解决农业可持续性问题的时候，这样的研究极其重要。通过学习农业适应性和土著农业的长期可持续性，我们可以学习如何维持农业可持续土壤。该项目还将培训大量的本科生和研究生，包括夏威夷原住民，并将使夏威夷的中学生和高中生了解他们家乡的社会和农业实践历史。该项目建立在夏威夷土壤成土工作的基础上，并利用人类活动相对较短的时间框架（大约一千年）来全面了解人类对土壤的影响。项目数据将推进土壤成土作用和生物地球化学的知识，同时使用跨学科的方法在生态位构建的框架内量化工业化前人类对土壤的影响。总体假设认为，夏威夷工业化前农业生态位农业建设高度依赖于与生物地球化学环境的相互作用和反馈。研究团队将追求五个具体目标：(1)利用土壤、元素和同位素分析来表征和绘制天然土壤生物地球化学；(2)利用植物微遗骸、历史文献、遥感和地理空间建模等混合方法绘制农业战略地图；(3)通过土壤科学和生物地球化学模拟，记录和量化人类对土壤和生物地球化学循环的改变；(4)建立基于生物地球化学驱动因素的农业生态形态地理空间预测模型；(5)进一步将研究结果置于夏威夷土著社会生态系统的生物文化恢复中。该奖项由生态系统科学集群（BIO/DEB）和考古项目（SBE/BCS）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，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。

Humans affect soils through agriculture in several ways: removing nutrients, altering ground surfaces, changing vegetation, and so on. By changing the soil, people are also changing the future potential of agriculture on those soils. This project uses Hawai'i Island as a model system to understand how centuries of farming has impacted the soils. Hawai'i is an excellent study system because of the diverse soil types created by the combination of different aged lava flows and broad rainfall gradients, and because of the diverse agricultural strategies Hawaiian farmers used on the different soils. Such studies are extremely important today as the world grapples with agricultural sustainability. By learning about agricultural adaptation and the long-term sustainability of indigenous agriculture we can learn how to maintain agriculturally sustainable soils. This project will also train a significant number of undergraduate and graduate students, including Native Hawaiians, and will engage middle and high school students in Hawai'i in learning about the history of social and agricultural practices of their home.This project builds upon a foundation of soil pedogenesis work in Hawai'i and leverages the relatively short time frame of human occupation (approximately one millennia) to understand anthropogenic impacts on soils in their entirety. Project data will advance knowledge of soil pedogenesis and biogeochemistry while using interdisciplinary methods to quantify pre-industrial human impact on soils within a framework of niche construction. The overarching hypothesis is that niche agroecological construction of pre-industrial agriculture in Hawai'i was highly dependent on interaction with and feedback to the biogeochemical environment. The research team will pursue five specific aims: (1) use soil, elemental, and isotopic analysis to characterize and map natural soil biogeochemistry; (2) map agricultural strategies using mixed methods of plant micro-remains, historical documentation, remote sensing, and geospatial modeling; (3) document and quantify human alteration of soils and biogeochemical cycling through soil science and biogeochemical modeling; (4) create predictive geospatial models of agroecological forms based on biogeochemical drivers; and (5) further situate findings within the biocultural restoration of Native Hawaiian socioecosystems. This award was co-funded by the Ecosystem Science Cluster (BIO/DEB) and the Archaeology Program (SBE/BCS).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.