SGER: Crop and Forest Losses Due to Hurricane Dean

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

Resilience theory has evolved in recent years to build on the idea that ecological and social systems are mutually constitutive, although adaptation of the system relies mainly on social systems. Resilience itself implies the ability of a system to absorb changes while maintaining its identity or self-organization and improving this absorption and adaptability. How societies respond to social and environmental change is a lynchpin in understanding adaptation and the resilience of a given social ecological system. These adaptations remain poorly understood and undertheorized in academia and in the resource-management community, however. Understanding the states and processes that unite social, economic, cultural, political, and ecological facets of social ecological systems is crucial in the search for sustainability and improved human life. Within this theoretical context, a team of investigators will use a Small Grant for Exploratory Research to examine the resilience of people and ecosystems to the impacts of Hurricane Dean, a Class-5 hurricane that struck the Yucatan Peninsula in August 2007. The investigators will examine this catastrophic natural disaster in southern Mexico by measuring the impact of the hurricane on crop yields, a variable that has significant implication for disaster planning, especially in frontier areas. The investigators also will use remotely sensed data for the region from 1967 to the present, including aerial photographs and Landsat MSS and TM imagery to determine the extent of landscape change from the storm, and they will assess housing damage, tree fall in forested regions, flooding, and watercourse changes. These ephemeral data will be used to facilitate the rapid assessment of hurricane impacts on human settlement and on forest ecosystems. This project will gather critical ephemeral data and provide means for testing hypotheses associated with the impacts of a major hurricane on human settlement and forest ecosystems. The study should help facilitate efforts to accurately portray the immediate social and environmental impacts of hurricanes that can lead to longer term understanding of socio-ecological systems' resilience and vulnerability to rapid and gradual change. The data will have special significance, because the investigators have been working in the Yucatan for more than a decade, and the data collected in the wake of Dean will add to long-term databases of variables measuring change under more benign conditions. In addition to its intellectual merit, the project is expected to help develop an understanding of impacts and proper planning to hurricanes that can help governments plan for natural disasters and inform aid agencies how best to assist post-catastrophe relief and redevelopment efforts.