New approaches to quantifying global ecosystems including dynamical human interactions

由于人类活动，全球生态系统正在以自白垩纪末期以来可能从未发生过的速度发生变化。成千上万的研究人员正在尝试理解这种转变，产生了大量的详细知识。但是，这些努力往往是在学科中孤立的，因此，包括人类活动在内的整个相互作用的系统很少在一个共同的定量框架内进行研究。这种概念上的碎片化在理解整个生态系统如何在地球表面的物理环境中发挥作用方面留下了重要的空白，并且忽略了人类观察可能对生态系统功能产生的有价值的信息。我的研究项目建立在我对气候、生物地球化学和生态系统建模的背景之上，现在通过开发一个综合的、定量的框架来解决包括人类在内的全球生态系统，从而更好地理解人类生态系统的界面。这种方法是建立在宏观生态学的最新进展基础上的，它提供了一种新的方法，根据身体大小和能量流动原理，用相对较少的方程从环境特征预测整个陆地和海洋生态系统。这些生态系统模型将与人类活动的简单表示相结合，适用于百年时间尺度的整合，并进行定制，以最大限度地利用可用的数据约束。总体目标是更全面地了解生态系统，包括人类，同时利用对人类活动的全球观察，对生物系统的功能提供新的认识。该提案通过四个工作包向前迈出了重要一步。首先，全球二维地表地球系统模型的开发——这是此类模型中的第一个——将使陆地和海洋生态系统能够以一种计算效率高的设计与人口充分结合起来。其次，对我们先前基于尺寸的海洋生态系统模型进行重大扩展和改进，将提高真实性，并将生态系统过程与生物地球化学循环联系起来。第三，构建基于尺度的陆地表面生态系统新方法，利用全球大型数据集进行模型定标，为基于网格的生态分量提供标准依据。第四，建立一个动态、互动、广义的人类种群及其活动模型，该模型可用于模拟人类提取生物量的大规模特征、生态系统影响及其在人类史前和历史时期的变化。这四个工作包将实现关键的技术进步，为研究计划的进一步步骤铺平道路，同时有助于假设的发展和完善，可能在短期内产生意想不到的发现。

Global ecosystems are being transformed at rates that probably have not occurred since the end of the Cretaceous, as a result of human activities. Attempts to understand this transformation are being undertaken by many thousands of researchers, yielding a great wealth of detailed knowledge. But these efforts are often isolated within disciplines, so that the full interacting system - including human activity - is rarely studied within a common quantitative framework. This conceptual fragmentation leaves important gaps in the understanding of how entire ecosystems function within the physical environment of the Earth surface, and ignores the valuable information that observations of humans can potentially shed on ecosystem functioning. My research program builds on my background in modeling climate, biogeochemistry and ecosystems, and is now oriented towards a better understanding of the human-ecosystem interface by developing an integrated, quantitative framework that resolves the global ecosystem including its human component. The approach is built on recent advances in macroecology, that provide a novel means to predict whole terrestrial and marine ecosystems from environmental features with relatively few equations, based on body size and principles of energy flow. These ecosystem models will be coupled to simple representations of human activities, suitable for centennial-timescale integrations and tailored to maximize the use of available data constraints. The general goals are to provide a more holistic understanding of ecosystems, including humans, while shedding new light on the functioning of biological systems by leveraging global observations of human activity. This proposal takes a major step forward through four workpackages. First, the development of a global two-dimensional Surface Earth System Model - the first of its kind - will allow terrestrial and marine ecosystems to be fully integrated with human populations in a computationally-efficient design. Second, a major expansion and refinement of our prior size-based marine ecosystem model, will improve realism and connect ecosystem processes with biogeochemical cycling. Third, construction of new size-based ecosystem approaches for the land surface, tailored to use the large global datasets available for model calibration, and to provide the standard basis for the grid-based ecological components. Fourth, a dynamic, interactive, generalized model of human populations and their activities, which can be applied to simulate the large-scale features of biomass extraction by humans, the ecosystem impacts, and how they changed over human prehistory and history. These four workpackages will achieve critical technical advances, paving the way for further steps in the research program, while contributing to hypothesis development and refinement that are likely to produce unexpected discoveries in the short term.