Land-use and land-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. In this interdisciplinary research project, the researchers will 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 LULCC 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.
Land-use and land-cover change is reshaping the Earth's biosphere and altering species habitats. As a result LULCC 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 LULCC 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. The use of complexity theory to analyze LULCC system dynamics on an ecologically vital frontier will yield better understand its resilience and its future. An integrated simulation modeling approach that draws upon collected ethnographic data and a household and community survey will serve as a focused statistical base to create rules for an agent based model (ABM) that 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. This project is supported by an award resulting from the FY 2004 special competition in Biocomplexity in the Environment focusing on the Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems.
