Climate Change Impacts on the Past and Future Coastal Freshwater Resources of Oceanic Islands

历史表明，人类长期面临气候变化的巨大挑战。记录过去的人们如何通过适应和创新来应对环境变化，为更好地解决当前和未来的挑战提供了重要信息。这项研究的重点是一个小岛屿，它是人类历史上一个很好的案例研究，展示了过去的社区适应不可预测和不断变化的环境和气候条件的独特方式。在这个与世隔绝、资源贫乏的小岛上，尽管淡水极度匮乏，古干旱频繁，但人们却可持续地生活了500多年。然而，人们对过去的岛民如何管理不断变化的淡水供应仍知之甚少。该项目通过整合考古学、水文地质学、地理空间科学和传统生态知识，对古代适应淡水稀缺的方法进行了融合。利用跨学科的方法，该项目将产生一个水文地质模型，并将产生一个空间和时间重建古代水管理的适应。除了解决过去人类社区如何适应水资源短缺的基本问题外，该项目还将为当代岛民提供可操作的数据，以减轻当今气候变化带来的迫在眉睫的风险，并制定有针对性的计划，通过为多名学生提供一系列推广和培训机会，扩大考古学和地球科学的参与。总的来说，这项工作将为过去人类社区为适应不断变化的环境条件而采用的巧妙和可持续的战略提供新的见解。这些见解将有助于解决今天类似的问题。该项目的中心目标是解决古代水管理系统如何随着时间的推移而出现，以适应气候变化。最近的证据表明，岛上居民通过收集和管理海底地下水排放（SGD），在潮汐线上出现新鲜地下水的位置，创造了独特的适应淡水短缺的方法。该项目将利用融合水文地质学、遥感、考古学和传统生态知识的历史生态框架，检验关于SGD为岛上提供最丰富和最可靠的淡水来源的假设;古代的水管理功能被创新和建立，以在干旱增加和多年干旱事件期间管理/提取SGD，水坝的建造是为了利用高降雨量的机会。该项目将通过水文地质、考古和地理空间数据收集来检验这些假设。研究结果将纳入全岛水文地质模型，并记录与古代水管理有关的考古特征。这项研究将通过提供对过去环境和气候风险解决方案的清晰理解，产生更广泛的知识和社会影响，生成受气候变化威胁的考古特征的文件，为寻求缓解这些挑战的利益相关者社区提供可操作的数据，并为不同的学生提供有针对性的培训和教育。由于气候变化引起的淡水短缺问题正在威胁太平洋岛屿，这项以社区为基础的融合研究的结果将对更好地了解人类社区过去和未来的可持续性产生更广泛的影响。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。

History has shown that humans have long faced considerable challenges of climate change. Documenting how past people responded to environmental change, through adaptations and innovations, offers vital information for better solutions to present and future challenges. This study focuses on a small island which makes an excellent case study in human history demonstrating the unique ways past communities adapted to unpredictable and changing environmental and climatic conditions. On this small, isolated, and resource-poor island, people lived sustainability for over 500 years despite extreme freshwater scarcity and frequent paleo-droughts. Understanding how past islanders managed changing freshwater availability, however, remains poorly understood. This project takes a convergent approach to ancient adaptations to freshwater scarcity through the integration of archaeology, hydrogeology, geospatial science, and traditional ecological knowledge. Using a transdisciplinary approach, this project will yield a hydrogeological model and will produce a spatial and chronological reconstruction of ancient water management adaptations. In addition to resolving fundamental questions of how past human communities adapted to water scarcity, the project will yield actionable data for contemporary islanders to deploy in mitigating impending risks from climate change today, and a targeted plan to broaden participation in archaeology and geoscience through a range of outreach and training opportunities for multiple students. Overall, this work will offer new insights into the ingenious and sustainable strategies used by past human communities to adapt to changing environmental conditions. These insights will contribute to solving similar problems today.The central goal of this project is to resolve how ancient water management systems emerged over time as adaptive responses to climate change. Recent evidence indicates that the islanders innovated unique adaptations to freshwater scarcity through the collection and management of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD), locations at which fresh groundwater emerges at the tideline. Using a convergent historical ecological framework that integrates expertise in hydrogeology, remote sensing, archaeology, and traditional ecological knowledge, this project will test the hypotheses that SGD provides the most abundant and reliable source of fresh water on the island; ancient water management features were innovated and established to manage/extract SGD during times of increased aridity and multi-year drought events, and dams were built to opportunistically exploit high rainfall events. This project will test these hypotheses through hydrogeological, archaeological, and geospatial data collection. The results will be incorporated into an island-wide hydrogeological model as well as document archaeological features associated with ancient water management. This research will result in broader intellectual and societal impacts by providing a clear understanding of past solutions to environmental and climatic risks, generating documentation of archaeological features imminently threatened by climate change, result in actionable data for stakeholder communities who seek to mitigate these challenges, and offer targeted training and education to diverse students. As issues of climate-induced freshwater scarcity are looming threats across the Pacific Islands, the results of this community-based, convergent research will have broader impacts for a better understanding of both the past and future sustainability of human communities.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.