This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
More than one-half of the global human population now lives in cities. In the U.S., Sun Belt cities like Tampa are growing rapidly, but rapidly growing cities consume more natural resources than they produce. Urban ecosystems rely on the redistribution and concentration of resources from much larger rural areas, but the factors influencing and the consequences of this resource redistribution remain poorly understood. This research project will use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how social relationships facilitate the transfer of water from a rural to an urban area, and it will examine how water redistribution modifies social and ecological systems within the city and in the broader water-providing region. The focus of this project is the socioecosystem of the Tampa Bay region in west-central Florida, where water limits urban development. Water is transferred in this region from rural groundwater wellfields to the Tampa metropolis. Wetlands along the urban-to-rural corridor provide sentinel response systems that will be monitored for the effects of groundwater drawdown and other changes (such as urban land development) made possible by water redistribution. This project will have three major emphases. First, the investigators will survey residents along the urban-rural corridor to quantify demographic and geographic variability in perceptions, values, and awareness of hydrological and wetland change. Second, in order to document how organizational structure and public feedback affect policy, the investigators will interview key informants (resource managers, policy makers) and will observe participant interactions at public water-policy meetings. Third, they will use geographic information systems to study how urbanization alters the landscape around wetlands, and they will partner with water utility and management entities to analyze how the hydrology, plant community, and organic matter storage of wetlands respond to water redistribution.
Humans have long modified their environment through the pursuit of necessities and amenities. In turn, people perceive and reorganize around these environmental changes. Human culture and institutions thus are components of socioecosystems in which social and biophysical factors form a complex web of interactions. This project will advance socioecological theory by elucidating if and how humans develop new policies and behaviors in response to the very environmental changes that they cause. The research team includes social and natural scientists from five academic units at the University of South Florida and from the U.S. Forest Service, and it is developing models of integrated social and ecological change. The principles that emerge from this study are likely to help prevent "water wars" that often accompany urban growth. This award was funded as an Urban Long-Term Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) award as the result of a special competition jointly supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.
