MCA: Consilience: Advancing Frontiers in Modeling Socioecological Mosaics from Field to Satellite

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

MCA: Consilience: Advancing Frontiers in Modeling Socioecological Mosaics from Field to Satellite 2322286 Crews, Kelley A; University of Texas at Austin This project investigates the nature of human-environment interactions in semi-arid systems. These interactions are thought to take shape differently across changing local variations in landscapes as well as among residential groups whose land management knowledge and practice may vary with their personal, family, and social network experience. Lastly, these relationships may be positively or negatively impacted by factors external to the people and their lands, such as changes in precipitation, market changes, or political rules. Understanding how these relationships and impacts function across scales of observations, spheres of management, and reach of external factors is enriched by incorporating local resident feedback from the start of the project and through every stage in this research. Distinguished from the previous case studies, the research informs where substantial resident/stakeholder input aids in research and management effectiveness, accuracy, and efficiency. This work extends the theoretical framing of social-ecological systems to focus more intensively on local to regional contexts in space and time and remote populations in places where there is lesser infrastructure than urban centers and where people are ultimately both heavily dependent upon and the stewards for adjacent lands under communal, private, or protective management. Underlying this approach are three key questions: 1) how do landscapes respond to external variabilities among open use versus private use versus conservation management strategies practiced by residents with varying backgrounds in land use, extraction, and management; 2) how do family experiences and perceptions impact their livelihood and land management decisions given those same external variabilities, specifically, the length of time an extended family has lived in an area and their individual and collective environmental perception; and 3) if and how these relationships in questions 1 and 2 are systematically and predictably related across space and time. These results inform land management practices to maximize people’s livelihoods and environmental management and give insight into which local and regional factors most matter in promoting family, food, environmental, and economic security in variable conditions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.