Professor Steve Walsh receives NSF Biocomplexity Award

Some info on the new NSF Biocomplexity grant:

Walsh, S.J., G.P. Malanson, R.E. Bilsborrow, F.L. Holt, J.P. Messina, 2004-2007. Feedbacks Among Patterns and Processes of Land Use and Land Cover Dynamics in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. National Science Foundation, Biocomplexity in the Environment, $321,488.

Abstract
Land use/cover change (LULCC) associated with tropical deforestation has been characterized as complex in that feedbacks between the human and natural components of the system create dynamic trajectories with emergent properties. The most important feedbacks are those related to the spatial structure of the system. We investigate how feedbacks at a frontier of human settlement in the Ecuadorian tropical rainforest create system dynamics that constrain the future trajectories of human settlement.

The tropical rainforest of northeastern Ecuador is an area of complex interactions among a number of diverse stakeholders -- (a) spontaneous colonists who have in-migrated from other regions of the country and settled on household farms; (b) newly emerging communities and market centers that have consolidated services and offer off-farm employment to colonists; (c) indigenous people who are affected by the rise of commercial agriculture, oil production within their territories, and a transition to a consumer-based economy; (d) oil exploiters who have built roads and laid pipelines for petroleum extraction in colonist and indigenous areas; and (e) conservation and protected areas established to impeded development and retain biodiversity in a rapidly transforming frontier environment. The most extensive changes on the land are those wrought by agricultural colonists who migrated to the region in the wake of oil exploration, settling along roads built by oil companies starting around 1970. Interrelationships with the other stakeholders in the region are complex, resulting from different, often conflicting interests and feedbacks between spatial patterns and rates of change on the advancing frontier environment. Feedbacks constrain or even reverse some of the original changes in LULC through system dynamics. Properties emerging from local non-linear feedbacks constrain the evolving patterns of land use, and produce a system with identifiable potential future alternative states and dynamics characterized by phase changes.

LULCC is reshaping the Earth¡¯s biosphere and altering species habitats, which has significant implication for the vulnerability and sustainability of earth systems. Human-environment systems have characteristic cyclic dynamics that are linked in a hierarchy to faster and slower cycles. The cycles that change a system are often those in which feedbacks cross scales. The LULC dynamics on which people depend may be subject to rapid changes and shifts to situations that cannot support growing populations and their activities. The characteristics of systems that determine their responses in such conditions are summarized as resilience. By analyzing the LULC system dynamics of an ecologically vital frontier through complexity theory, we can better understand its resilience and its future. Using an integrated simulation modeling approach, we will draw upon collected ethnographic data and a household and community survey that serve as a focused statistical base to create rules for an Agent Based Model (ABM). The ABM will represent the land use decision-making of the key actors, and will provide parameters that simulate LULCC in the past and for future periods.