This project will synthesize the career research of Stuart Chapin in the context of other studies in the natural and social sciences in a book entitled -- Resilience and Adaptation: Managing for Sustainability in a Changing World. The book will describe the mechanisms that link social and ecological components of social-ecological systems. The book provides a framework for developing and implementing policies for resource management -- a framework based on the necessity of managing resources in a world dominated by uncertainty and directional trends in environmental, ecological, and social processes.
This book is important because it addresses one of the greatest challenges facing humanity: to sustain the desirable features of social-ecological systems in the face of human impacts on many of the variables that control these properties. This book directly addresses this challenge by providing a textbook for the next generation of resource managers and policy makers. The book describes the principles for managing social-ecological systems sustainably under conditions of uncertainty and change. The project builds on and contributes to an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program in Resilience and Adaptation that is currently training 40 graduate students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
