Hybrid ecological models to inform management and conservation decisions in production landscapes

这项发现补助金将资助一项研究计划，重点是研究景观作为复杂的环境系统，并将复杂系统研究的方法纳入当前的资源管理和保护方法。 景观复杂性的一个重要方面是不同的人类和生态成分之间的联系和相互作用。 由于缺乏适当的系统分析方法来处理所有这些相互作用，这种复杂性往往被忽视或忽视现有的模型和管理方法。 这一挑战的一个解决方案可能是将景观表示为一个网络，其中人类和生态组件是节点，组件之间的物质，能量或信息流是链接。 因此，拟议的研究的目标是创建新的基于网络的景观模型，并开发新的定量方法来分析这些网络的结构。这种方法将建立在复杂网络分析的尖端方法的基础上，并可能为景观的结构配置提供新的见解，这些结构配置对可持续性，复原力或生物多样性保护至关重要。该方法将被应用到两个案例研究：a）艾尔半岛，这是一个主要的农业系统在南澳，和B）一段管理的北方森林在魁北克的“科特诺德”地区。 网络模型将用于为这两个区域的生态系统管理和生物保护决策提供信息，为管理人员提供强大的工具，以评估人类和自然变化驱动因素对这些景观的潜在累积影响。通过提供新的，跨学科的工具和方法来研究景观作为复杂系统，该研究计划将显着推进定量方法在环境科学领域。该研究还将有助于向管理人员和利益相关者通报景观内的复杂相互作用以及采取全系统方法进行环境管理的必要性。

This Discovery Grant will fund a research program focused on the study of landscapes as complex environmental systems and the incorporation of methods from complex systems studies into current resource management and conservation approaches. One important aspect of landscape complexity is the multitude of connections and interactions between different human and ecological components. Due to a lack of appropriate methods of system analysis to deal with all of these interactions, such complexity is often ignored or disregarded by current models and management approaches. One solution to this challenge may be to represent a landscape as a network, in which human and ecological components are nodes, and flows of material, energy or information between components are links. The objective of the proposed research is thus to create novel network-based models of landscapes and to develop new quantitative methods to analyse the structure of these networks. This approach will build on cutting edge methods in complex network analysis and may provide new insight into the structural configurations of landscapes that are most important for sustainability, resilience or biodiversity conservation. The methods will be applied to two case studies: a) the Eyre Peninsula, which is a largely agricultural system in South Australia, and b) a section of managed boreal forest in Quebec's "Cote Nord" region. The network models will be used to inform ecosystem management and biological conservation decisions in the two regions, providing managers with powerful tools to assess the potential cumulative effects of human and natural drivers of change on these landscapes. By providing novel, cross-disciplinary tools and approaches for studying landscapes as complex systems this research program will significantly advance quantitative methods in the field of environmental science. The research will also contribute to informing managers and stakeholders about the complex interactions within a landscape and the need to take a whole-systems approach to environmental management.