DISES: Indigenous forest management in a non-stationary climate

几千年来，森林为人类社会提供了庇护、维持和提供生态系统商品和服务，包括固碳、营养和水资源。森林反映了人类管理、开采和保护互动的复杂组合，它们面临着来自经济力量和全球环境变化的无数威胁。该奖项将通过探索人类对这些相互作用的知识，探索森林是如何管理和维持数千年的。该奖项将使用正式的技术或“西方”科学和土著知识(在这里由土著社区持有的当地祖先知识定义)的方法和理解来探索森林的动态。这项研究将严格评估新热带针叶林的森林干扰历史和气候敏感性模型，采用西方方法进行树轮研究，了解土著森林管理者如何感知气候风险，土著社区领导的现有森林管理系统，以了解土著知识如何应用于这些社区的森林管理，这种知识的获取和传播如何因包括移徙在内的社会变化而改变，以及这与现有的土著知识体系有何关系。该项目包括与教育、培训和共同生产知识有关的一系列更广泛的影响，这些知识侧重于建设地方能力和产生可用于研究土著社区保护的森林的社会-环境耦合系统的变异性范围的信息。森林生态系统是生物圈的重要组成部分，在大气与陆地表面的耦合和碳循环方面发挥着重要作用。这些环境还为从地方到全球的人类社会提供、维持和提供生态系统产品和服务，包括碳封存和水资源。森林是完全整合的社会环境系统，反映了生物圈、大气和人类社会之间的相互作用、交流和反馈。陆地保护区和生态完好的地貌由土著人民保护和管理，但迫在眉睫的气候破坏和森林干扰制度的变化威胁着生态系统的状况以及依赖和影响生态系统的人类生计。土著知识反映了土著社区对该系统的整体累积了解；然而，移徙和其他社会和文化变化改变了环境知识在这些社区的传播方式。现代土著知识如何整合几个世纪以来的社会环境互动和经验，面对即将超越过去几个世纪变化的社会和环境系统，这一知识体系将如何改变？这种研究方法结合了对过去、现在和未来森林历史和树木年代学的干扰的长期理解，对随时间推移的土著管理和保护做法的新见解，对传统环境知识动态、规模和变化的理解，以及对未来社会生态变化的预测。该项目旨在了解森林动态的本土知识如何反映几个世纪以来的生态系统变异性，以及这个耦合系统中人类和生态部分的非平稳性将如何影响这个社会生态系统的管理、保护和保存。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Forests have provided shelter, sustain, and provide ecosystem goods and services, including carbon sequestration, nourishment, and water resources for human societies for millennia. Forests reflect a complex mix of human management, extraction, and conservation interactions, and they face a myriad of threats from both economic forces and global environmental change. This award will explore how forests have been managed and sustained over millennia through exploring the human knowledge of these interactions. This award will explore the forest’s dynamics using: formal technical or ‘Western’ scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (defined here by local ancestral knowledge held by Indigenous communities) approaches and understanding. This study will rigorously assess forest disturbance history and model forest climate sensitivity in neotropical conifer forests using western methods from tree-ring studies and understanding how climatic risks are perceived by indigenous forest managers, the forest management systems in place led by indigenous communities, to understand how Indigenous Knowledge is applied to forest management in these communities and how this knowledge acquisition and transmission could be modified by social changes including migration, and how this relates to the existing body of Indigenous Knowledge. The project includes a range of broader impacts related to education, training, and co-production of knowledge focused on building local capacity and generating information that can be applied to study the range of variability in the coupled socio-environmental system of forests conserved by Indigenous communities. Forest ecosystems are a critical component of the biosphere and play an important role in coupling the atmosphere to the land surface and carbon cycle. These environments also shelter, sustain, and provide ecosystem goods and services, including carbon sequestration and water resources, for human societies at scales from local to global. Forests are fully integrated socio-environmental systems that reflect reciprocal interactions, exchanges, and feedbacks between biosphere, atmosphere, and human society. Terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes are conserved and managed by indigenous peoples, but imminent climate disruption and changes in forest disturbance regimes threaten the state of ecosystems and the human livelihoods that both depend on and affect them. Indigenous Knowledge reflects holistic accumulated understanding of the system by indigenous communities; however, migration and other social and cultural changes have altered the modes of transmission of environmental knowledge in these communities. How does modern Indigenous Knowledge integrate centuries of socio-environmental interactions and experiences and how will that knowledge system change in the face of social and environmental systems that will imminently shift beyond the variability of the last several centuries? This research approach combines a long-term understanding of past, present, and future forest history and disturbance from dendrochronology, novel insights into indigenous management and conservation practices through time, an understanding of traditional environmental knowledge dynamics, scale, and change, and forecasts of future socio-ecological change. This project seeks to understand how indigenous knowledge of forest dynamics reflect centuries of ecosystem variability and how non-stationarity in both the human and ecological components of this coupled system will affect management, conservation, and preservation of this socio-ecological system.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.