Assistant Professor David Carr is the Co-PI for a proposal which was awarded a recent grant for research in the NSF’s new Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program. The program is in its first year; is designed to provide a better understanding of natural processes and cycles, human behavior and decisions, and how they interact; and is supported by NSF’s directorates for biological sciences, geosciences, and social, behavioral, and economic sciences. The proposal, “CNH: Collaborative Research: The Impact of Economic Globalization on Human Demography, Land Use, and Natural Systems in Latin American and the Caribbean,” was written in conjunction with T. Mitchell Aide of the University of Puerto Rico and resulted in a $564,421 grant.
The award is one of just 12 grants given this year to scientists, engineers, and educators across the country to study coupled natural and human systems. “Improved models for understanding how the geosphere, biosphere and atmosphere are interconnected will rely on research like that supported in CNH projects,” said James Collins, NSF assistant director for biological sciences. “The focus of these projects is on uncovering the strong and weak forces that link a wide range of ecosystems. In all these ecosystems, humans play an increasingly important role.”
According to the proposal’s Abstract, the study is designed to “reveal new concepts that will facilitate society’s understanding of the socioeconomic and biodiversity consequences of global change. The major contribution will be a detailed database that integrates demographic, economic, land-use, and ecosystem data at multiple spatial scales. This information will be used to create continental-scale models of land-use change, and these models will be used to facilitate local governments and non-governmental organizations in regional to local planning. The project will combine demographic and socio-economic data from >18,000 municipalities throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean with remote sensing analyses of land-cover/land-use change for the period 1980-2000. In addition, the project will document how these demographic and land-use changes are affecting natural ecosystem and local inhabitants by conducting ecosystem inventories and household interviews in selected countries. This project will create a large database, which will allow us to model the complex interaction between and among human and natural systems.” For more, see http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=110437
