ABSTRACT

Major advancements in technology, data computation power, and theory are converging in the ecological profession at a time of great uncertainty for humanity. Many ecosystems are experiencing rapid and sudden collapses and transitioning to less productive ecosystem states, threatening fundamental ecosystem services upon which humanity relies. Food and water security, rural economies, water rights, wildfire disaster avoidance, even funding for public school education are all threatened as a result of simple transitions in vegetation occurring at a rate and geographic scope that is unmatched during the lives of previous generations. This project will build critical expertise and leverage technology in new ways to confront the grand challenge of management to avoid large, regional-scale transitions in vegetation. Resilience theory and the formal study of regime shifts in nature have been foundational science pursuits for nearly 50 years in of ecology, and technology and computational power are now at a point that allows launch of the next level of analysis in the study and application of resilience science. This project will develop resilience informatics screening tools for more advanced and earlier detection of vegetation transitions. The project will create critical capacities to explore this new and transformative informatics approach into social governance structures and thus improve options for avoiding critical transitions in social-ecological systems.


Tracking and predicting large-scale ecosystem transitions are of national and international importance and key to securing the future livelihoods, personal security, food security, and water security of diverse populations in a changing world. This research converges faculty from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Montana with a shared vision - to build sufficient capacity to address the grand challenge of avoiding undesirable transitions in ecological systems that are so severe that their consequences go beyond the traditions of any one individual investigator's disciplinary expertise. We propose a spatial informatics approach that links recent advances in resilience theory with a state-of-the-art rangeland landcover and analysis dataset, and a powerful cloud-computing platform, as screening tools for more advanced and earlier detection of regime shifts across ecosystems. At the same time, we propose basic social science research to better understand the barriers and opportunities to applying innovative technological approaches to build resilience across working lands. We will leverage emerging, big-data approaches to social and behavioral data analysis to pioneer an approach for rapid and strategic identification of individuals and social groups with increased willingness and capacity to address future regime shifts and other environmental challenges of national priority. Our collaboration of social and biophysical science faculty will engage with collaborative landscape governance processes in Nebraska and Montana, include groups of resource users and managers, and translate this knowledge into proactive strategies for addressing various scales of ecological change before it occurs, through adaptation and resilience-building processes. This collaboration is built on five key convergence points which establish: a platform for sustaining research productivity through recruitment and training of early-career faculty; a nationally-recognized resilience-science education program; and greater access to cyberinfrastructure among public and private stakeholders.

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.

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