SPRF-IBSS: Linking complex social and ecological systems through integrative network modeling

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar studying complex social and ecological systems. Humans rely on the natural environment to support to support a wide array of social needs, such as health, prosperity, and welfare. Yet natural systems are facing an unprecedented level of stress, and strategies to advance global sustainability are urgently needed. This challenge is particularly relevant for coral reefs, which are critical for supporting biodiversity and human well-being, yet continue to decline globally. In an effort toward meeting this challenge, this grant supports an SBE postdoctoral fellow in assessing how connections within and between coastal communities and fisheries resources contribute to successful (or unsuccessful) management of coral reefs. Results are uncovering problematic power dynamics, and providing recommendations on the connections that communities and practitioners should seek to build to improve biodiversity conservation and social well-being. Supporting NSF?s mission to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare, this project directly informs coral reef management planning and practice in the U.S and abroad, with results and insights being disseminated to fishing communities, practitioners, marine resource managers, and the scientific community. This project also directly addresses NSF?s mission to promote scientific progress by linking theory and data from the social and ecological sciences, and by defining frontiers in applied ecosystem modeling. Finally, this project advances education and diversity by providing the fellow with invaluable training and preparing her for a productive career in academia, where women have been historically underrepresented. How do connections within and between people (the social system) and nature (the ecological system) mediate outcomes in social-ecological systems? To what extent are social and ecological systems interdependent, and how might this vary with context? To answer these questions, the SBE fellow is advancing a novel interdisciplinary network modeling framework to assess how social-ecological interdependencies within and between fishing communities and fisheries resources mediate outcomes, i.e., livelihood benefits and sustainable fisheries, in coral reef ecosystems from across the Asia-Pacific. This research leverages cutting edge advances in multi-level random graph modeling and brings together perspectives from sociology, political economy, human geography, and ecology in order to (1) identify key social and ecological interdependencies, (2) understand how social actors mediate social interactions and relationships with resources, and (3) develop novel theory and cultivate practical guidance for more effective natural resource management. This project provides important empirical insight on how social and ecological systems are interlinked, the factors that drive the formation of social-ecological structures, and how social-ecological feedbacks relate to outcomes, thus presenting a unique opportunity for the development of theory applicable to a much wider range of settings. This work also contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary research investigating the role of social connectivity, power asymmetries, and social-ecological alignment in facilitating (or impeding) desirable outcomes in environmental governance. Finally, this research is advancing a novel interdisciplinary methodological framework that can be applied empirically across a range of contexts in both the social and ecological sciences.