Research led by SFI Chair of Faculty Jennifer Dunne is among 21 new projects being funded by the National Science Foundation's Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems program, intended to promote a better understanding of how humans and the environment interact.
The four-year, $1.3 million grant will support research that examines feedbacks between humans and the complex ecological systems that support them on four well-studied French Polynesian islands. Humans arrived in the area about one thousand years ago, living sustainably on some islands but not on others.
Their project applies methods from ecology, hydrology, oceanography, archaeology, demography, and economics to study relationships between initial ecological and environmental conditions and subsequent human cultural developmental trajectories in the four study systems. This will help the researchers develop an understanding of how and why humans succeeded or failed to live sustainably.
Computational models will be used to test theories regarding long-term human-ecology-environment feedbacks. The researchers are particularly interested in the dual roles humans played as subsistence consumers and market-driven exploiters of resources.
The project seeks to develop a comprehensive network model of dynamic coupled natural-human systems, including their robustness and resilience to external and internal change; to apply the model to, and test it against, the introduction, persistence, and dynamics of Polynesians on four Pacific Islands; and to explore how the development and application of the model might support further advances in our understanding of diversity and complexity and their interactions with ecosystem management.
"Such advances are vital for addressing critical problems at the intersection of social and natural sciences including resource overconsumption, climate disruption, and catastrophic transitions in ecological and human systems," says Dunne, the project's principal investigator. Co-principal investigators include Neo Martinez (University of Arizona), Patrick Kirch (UC Berkeley), Neil Davies (UC Berkeley), and Jennifer Kahn (College of William and Mary).
Read the NSF news release (September 25, 2013)