MAP Research Area
Currently Funded Research Projects
NSF Funded HSD Proposal (note significant changes made on funding, Florida site cut, study area became MAP)
Amazon: MAP Region
Funded September 2005, NSF HSD. Initial field visit and TREM Summer 2006, took part in the MAP 2006 Conference. Graduate Students funded through NSF Project: Matt Marsik and Karla Rocha as of Fall 2006.
Summary: We propose to advance understanding of road impacts on relationships between people and forests in the MAP region of the Amazon. New or newly paved roads and other infrastructure upgrades bring complex changes to regions, including ecological degradation, social conflict, and economic development. “Road ecology” emerged to study transport systems and ecology, but still needed is attention human agency with a focus on livelihood decisions and resource use. These not only respond to new infrastructure, but also lead to ecological and institutional changes that in turn generate feedback effects that may affect human well-being. We approach this multidisciplinary topic by drawing on an interdisciplinary complex systems framework, but in a way that allows for empirical testing and evaluation. We focus on social-ecological systems as integrated wholes via the interface of infrastructure and land tenure institutions. We draw on the concept of resilience, a property of complex systems, and reformulate it in terms of system components, relationships, innovations and continuity, which affords a means of observing system properties relevant to the retention or loss of system identity. We also expand on the concept of connectivity to consider its importance not only as infrastructure linkages that bring external shocks from outside regions, but also as networks of local connections among social, institutional and ecological actors and processes. These ideas motivate specific expectations about connectivity and resilience, both at the scale of a social-ecological system and for specific components within a system. We will spatially integrate state data and cartographic products, cadastral maps, satellite imagery, social surveys, and vegetation transects using GPS and GIS. This will allow identification of social actors, institutions, and habitat patches as system components in geographic space. Further, we will specify the relationships among those components via their local connections, which allows for monitoring of changes in those networks over time. This will allow for spatial analysis of temporal dynamics, particularly feedback effects to livelihood decisions and well-being. We will develop dynamic simulation models for both sites, incorporate input from stakeholders about possible future scenarios to extend the simulations beyond the project life, and engage in comparative analysis across sites. We anticipate that this research will improve design of integrated databases for interdisciplinary environmental research, facilitate empirical evaluation of complex systems theory, and result in more robust frameworks for understanding human agency and environmental change.
Research Narrative
