Social-ecological systems occur wherever humans interact with their environment to sustain their well-being. Examples include communities of fishermen, forest users, and irrigators, many of which have functioned for centuries in a relatively decentralized manner. In each of these systems, groups of users may face a variety of disturbances or disruptions, such as droughts, state policy intervention, or economic development and urbanization. Scholars focusing on these issues have not fully explained how such decentralized systems that in the past responded successfully to age-old disturbances, have not kept pace with the occurrence of novel disturbances brought on by changing biophysical and political or economic regimes. This doctoral dissertation research project will help to fill these gaps by analyzing a set of community-based irrigation systems in northern New Mexico known as "acequias". It will integrate several scientific approaches, including institutional, social network, historical, and econometric regression analyses, as well as geographic information systems and remote sensing technologies, in order to understand how the acequias in an area known as the Taos valley have historically responded to floods and droughts, and more recently to state intervention and economic development. The research will involve collecting data through interviews with irrigators in the valley, archival data regarding historic water use and important legislation, state-produced hydrographic surveys of the area, and Landsat satellite imagery to measure the systems' abilities to maintain agricultural production over time. These data will be used in the creation of databases of the social network used to manage water, and of important institutional, demographic, and biophysical information. These databases will be used to help understand the outcomes produced when the systems interact with social and ecological disturbances.
Given that many of the world's natural resources are managed by local user groups, it is important to understand how and whether they are resilient or vulnerable to different types of disturbances. This research will help to answer theoretical questions as well as applied policy questions. It will explore how user groups are able to manage geographically extensive resources from the bottom up, without centralized control. It will help understand what properties of social-ecological systems increase, or hamper, their ability to respond to disturbances such as floods and droughts. Additionally, it will further understanding of vertical linkages between multiple forms of government, and the effects these have on natural resource management. Finally, it will explore the effects that urbanization and economic development have had on these traditional community-based systems. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.
