New roads bring complex changes to regions, including ecological degradation, social conflict, and economic development. "Road ecology" emerged to study transport systems and ecology, but more attention is needed on the role of humans as agents of environmental change, with a focus on livelihood decisions and resource use. People do not simply respond to new infrastructure. They also produce ecological and institutional changes that in turn generate feedback effects that affect human well being. In this interdisciplinary research project, the investigators will use a complex systems framework to focus on social-ecological systems as integrated wholes via the interface of infrastructure and land tenure institutions. They will draw on the concept of resilience, a property of complex systems, and reformulate it in terms of system components, relationships, innovations, and continuity, which afford a means of observing system properties relevant to the retention or loss of system identity. They also will expand on the concept of connectivity to consider its importance not only as infrastructure linkages that bring external shocks from outside regions but also as networks of connections among local actors and processes. These ideas motivate specific expectations about connectivity and resilience, both at the scale of a social-ecological system and for specific components within a system. The investigators will examine the impacts of road connectivity changes on social-ecological resilience in a global biodiversity hotspot, the tri-national MAP region of the southwestern Amazon where Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru meet. The project will draw on considerable data already in hand for the study site while adding new data to capture changes underway after recent infrastructure upgrades on the Brazilian side. The investigators will spatially integrate state data and cartographic products, cadastral maps, satellite imagery, social surveys, and vegetation transects using GPS and GIS, thereby allowing identification of social actors, institutions, and habitat patches as system components in geographic space. The investigators also will specify the relationships among those components via their local connections, which allow monitoring of changes in those networks over time and facilitate spatial analysis of temporal dynamics, particularly feedback effects to livelihoods and well being. The analysis will be comparative, because infrastructure connectivity is higher on the Brazilian side than the others, allowing for a natural experiment in the same region. The investigators will develop a dynamic simulation model, incorporating input from stakeholders about possible future scenarios to extend the simulations beyond the project life.
This project will improve the design of integrated databases for interdisciplinary environmental research, facilitate empirical evaluation of complex systems theory, and result in more robust frameworks for understanding human agency and environmental change. It will build on an institutional agreement between the University of Florida and the Federal University of Acre and provide opportunities for students in both institutions to conduct field research and participate in data analysis and publications. Because local stakeholders in the tri-national MAP region of the southwestern Amazon have called for more scientific input and data products concerning social and ecological impacts of roads, the investigators will make data products available to regional schools and universities communities, and decision makers. Results from this project therefore should facilitate more informed planning about new infrastructure in order to capture economic benefits, manage social conflicts, and avoid ecological degradation. An award resulting from the FY 2005 NSF-wide competition on Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) supports this project. All NSF directorates and offices are involved in the coordinated management of the HSD competition and the portfolio of HSD awards.
