DMUU: Management of Ecosystems in the US Southwest and Related Areas of Northern Mexico in the Context of Complex Uncertainties

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

Climatic, ecological, and societal changes are having major effects on the US Southwest and northern Mexico, but the complex changes that are occurring are poorly understood. At the same time, the potential is high for making significant contributions to improved decision making under conditions of biophysical and societal uncertainty. Two workshops will be held to address these issues. Workshop participants will include key researchers from academia, government, and non-governmental organizations who have expertise in biophysical and/or societal processes and systems in the region. The first workshop will identify the major issues and select themes for a set of papers to be written by a subgroup of workshop participants. These papers will summarize the status of scientific knowledge in the specified thematic areas and will provide information about crucial research and decision-support needs. A proceedings document also will be published that summarizes the workshop. The second workshop will review the papers produced from the first workshop and prioritize a series of viable research, education, and outreach activities. Summary documents from the second workshop will be published on the web, as well as a bibliography of key publications and other information sources. The workshops will address a critical issue in the region, how to harmonize people's disparate activities and aspirations in the context of multiple stressors and high levels of uncertainty about nature and implications of biophysical and societal changes occurring in the area. Biophysical and societal systems in the US Southwest, which stretch across the border into northern Mexico, are showing the results of these stressors in many ways. A marked increase in average annual temperatures over more than a decade is clearly discernible in the instrumental climate record, and paleo records indicate that the steepness of the increase is virtually unprecedented. At the same time, the region features a high degree of climatic variability, most crucially with regard to variations in precipitation and related availability of water resources over space and from one season, year, and decade to the next. These biophysical trends are accompanied by rapid population growth in the region, urban sprawl, exurban development of second and third homes, pressure on Native American lands and on cultural/religious sites important to them and other cultural groups in the area, high levels of activity and economic dependency on tourism in the most beautiful areas of the region, military activities, and transboundary flows of drug traffickers and illegal migrants. Solving these problems requires high levels of scientific interdisciplinarity, development of effective partnerships with stakeholders, and commitment to developing decision support tools that are both usable and useful for addressing the many issues that exist. The two workshops provide a jumping-off point for achieving these ends. This developmental award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).